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WILD TURKEYS 

AND 

TALLOW CANDLES 

By ELLEN HAYES 



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Class _ ,1- 4-^^ 
Book >Q:7_ir[4^ 
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COPWIGHT DEPOSm 



WILD TURKEYS 



AND 



TALLOW CANDLES 



BY 

ELLEN HAYES 

FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY AND APPLIED 

MATHEMATICS IN WELLESLEY COLLEGE. AUTHOR OF 

"CALCULtTS WITH APPLICATIONS," "LETTERS 

TO A COLLEGE GIRL," ETC. 




Boston 

The Four Seas Company 

1920 



Copyright, IQ20, by 
The Four Seas Company 






The Four Seas Press 
Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 



Sl/ 27 1920 

e:-ci,A6oii38 



GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSONS 
OF 

THAT THE FUTURE 
MAY BE LINKED WITH THE PAST 



PREFACE 

One October day in 1917 a far- traveled Fierce- 
Arrow car paused on the highway half a mile east 
of Granville, Ohio, and turning to the left took its 
course southward down a steep grade into an un- 
inviting by-road. Going a few hundred yards it was 
stopped by a bridge, obviously frail, and the oc- 
cupants of the car continued their explorations on 
foot. Where was that ever-flowing stream of 
artesian well-water which once came into existence 
when borings were made to find coal? An old 
woman from a solitary house explained that a 
disagreement over boundaries had provoked one of 
the parties to plug the pipe, and so the water flowed 
no more. Since when had cows been grazing in the 
mill-race, — once the home of catfish and mud- 
turtles? Just where did the forebay reach across 
the cart-road from the race to the big wheel, — that 
leaky forebay with its ever ready shower-bath? 
How long had the mill itself been gone? The auto- 
mobile turned back and took its pilgrims to a district 
north of the highway. "The frost is on the punkin 
and the fodder's in the shock" where formerly a 
willow-bordered mill-pond had welcomed skaters 
and fishermen and swimming boys, according to the 
season. Was there not corn-land enough in Licking 
County that Norton Case's good mill-pond should 
be thus sacrificed? A visit was made to a certain 

v 



vi PREFACE 

hillside orchard — an orchard once famous for miles 
around. It seems that apple-trees are not everlast- 
ing; though they outlive the hand that plants them, 
they too pass into old age and disappear. 

On all sides, on other streets no less than on this 
Centerville Street, marked changes — no doubt 
locally termed "improvements" were in evidence. 
Very much of Granville's earlier material environ- 
ment had gone in the making of those improve- 
ments — gone beyond recall and beyond any 
picturing except such as words may form. 
A day or two later, one member of that 
October pilgrim party, coming along eastward on 
a twentieth century train, began to see 
reasonableness in a suggestion to describe the life 
of the Granville of 1850—1860. It is the illusion of 
each generation that what is well-known and defi- 
nite today will always be so. Hence, records are 
inadequate and incompletely kept ; important letters 
are destroyed; precautions against fire are not 
taken; and of course the duplication of documents 
is held to be superfluous. In another decade or two 
there will be hardly any one living who will remem- 
ber the great Middle West as it was just before the 
Civil War. This fact is sufficient reason for the 
immediate writing of as many local narratives as 
possible. Upon such mid-century cross-sections 
must be based the future studies of that region and 
epoch. My own recollections cluster around one 
Ohio town some twenty-eight miles east of the 
capital of the State ; in recording these recollections 
my object has not been biographical, certainly not 
autobiographical. I am only trying to picture the 



PREFACE vii 

life of those long ago years in that Granville town 
as a child saw the life. 

As regards material for Part I, all who are 
acquainted with Bushnell's History of Granville will 
recognize my indebtedness to that work; and next 
to Bushnell's book I am under obligations to Isaac 
Smucker's various historical writings. Both of 
these authors rendered signal service to Licking 
County and so to Ohio itself by their timely 
collection of historical material. It is perhaps not 
necessary to mention other writers of Ohio history 
— a rather long list has been consulted — but from 
all their books I single out one, now unfortunately 
out of print: Morris Schaff' s Etna and Kirkersville, a 
book as charming as it is unpretentious, written by 
a man whose experiences in cities and on battlefields 
seem to have rendered only the more unfading and 
imperishable the recollections of his pioneer boy- 
hood. I have kept this book at my elbow to remind 
me constantly that I am not writing history in 
Part II; I am only developing some negatives 
personally acquired long ago. General Schaff has 
the advantage of me by eleven years' seniority; he 
remembers more things and remembers them in 
greater detail than I do. Yet it will be seen that I 
share with him the happy distinction of belonging 
to the pioneer epoch. We lived in different though 
neighboring communities ; and I can at least hope to 
supplement his narrative with further sketches of 
those tallow candle days. 

It is, however, to my brother Stanley that 
I must express my greatest obligation; for 
this little book owes its existence to him. With- 



viii PREFACE 

out his initial suggestion and later encouragement 
it would not have been undertaken. "The Society 
of Descendants of Henry Wolcott," which he has 
served as president, realizes to what an unusual de- 
gree this Granville-born descendant holds it both a 
duty and a privilege to honor the colonial ancestors. 
It is just and suitable that this Sketch should be dedi- 
cated to the children of Stanley Wolcott Hayes. I 
take the liberty of doing so, quite uithout his per- 
mission or knowledge. 

E. H. 
Wellesley, Mass. 
October, 1919. 



CONTENTS 



Chapter Page 

Introduction i 

PART 1. WILD TURKEY PERIOD 

I. Early Ohio 9 

II. A Vanguard of Neighbors 15 

III. The Pioneer Journey 20 

IV. A Land of Promise 26 

V. The Wilderness Home 31 

VI. The Pioneer Motive 46. 

PART II. TALLOW CANDLE PERIOD 

VII. Centerville Street 54 

VIII. An Octagon of Education 63 

IX. The Wolcott Homestead 71 

X. The Year Around 81 

XI. The County Fair 95 

XII. Autumn Days on The Farm .... 104 

XIII. A Child of The Ohio Eighteen-fifties 114 

XIV. Early Institutions 136 

XV. The Burnt-out Candle 150 

Appendix 159 

ix 



WILD TURKEYS AND 
TALLOW CANDLES 



INTRODUCTION 

THE WORLD'S WANDERERS 

Cras ingens iterabimus aequor. 

— Horace. 

The morning twilight of human history reveals 
man as a migrant. That primitive creature could 
hardly have been anything else, considering that he 
must have inherited from his prehuman ancestors 
not only the habit of moving from place to place, 
but also those material conditions which initially 
induced the habit. Climatic changes, failure in 
food supply, the lure of better hunting-grounds, 
better fishing-waters, were no doubt the earliest 
causes of wide wanderings. Closely related to these 
causes was the friction between groups or races, 
more powerful groups dispossessing weaker ones 
and occupying their lands. 

Whatever the minor to-and-fro motions, east and 
west, north and south, in Eurasia the migrations 
which were primary both in order of time and of 
importance were from east to west. Thus the 
mighty Cro-Magnon race of some 25,000 years ago 
either drove out or exterminated the Neanderthal 
men and occupied the region that is now southern 
France. These hunters and artists built their 
hearths and chipped their flints quite unmindful that 

1 



2 INTRODUCTION 

the grottoes which were homes to them were to 
become museums of prehistoric material. But the 
skull preserved beside the hearth was Asiatic, de- 
declaring in the fulness of time not only that the Cro- 
Magnon had been a migrant, but also that he had 
come from a land far to the east. 

These palaeolithic men of Western Europe were 
not the last, even as they had not been the first, to 
enter a land that was either one of refuge or con- 
quest. By the land-bridges and the valley ways, by 
mountain passes and island stepping-stones, in the 
Eurasian part of the globe race has followed race, 
checked by nothing but the "wet sea," the Atlantic, 
and probably not even by that in a time so early 
that a land-crossing could be found by way of 
Greenland. The conquest of the Atlantic itself was 
reserved for a later day and a modern world. 

Man's migratory activities fall, broadly speaking, 
into two classes: the moving bands go either as 
plunderers or pioneers. In the former case the 
action, on whatever scale conducted, is essentially 
a raid and is made with intention of return; that is, 
it is reversible. The operations of Attila and of 
Jenghiz Khan were of this type. On the other hand, 
migration proper, or colonizing, is distinctly non- 
reversible. The home-hunting journeyings of the 
Hindus as they may have poured through the passes 
of the Hindu Kush into the valley of the Indus 
furnished a fair example of permanent colonization. 
In true pioneer enterprises men have always taken 
their women and little ones with them, they have 
taken their house-gear, their folk-ways and folk- 
lore, and the places of advance in human culture 



INTRODUCTION 3 

have been determined by these colonizing move- 
ments. 

The adventure which consisted in the trans- 
Atlantic migration though a very recent one must 
be regarded as coordinate with the east-to-west land 
migrations which began at least three hundred 
centuries ago. Other thousands of years will no 
doubt need to slip away before history can ade- 
quately portray the effects of that Atlantic leap, 
shared in as it has been by most of the races to 
whom modern Europe has been home. We may 
know history in the making, but the scroll which 
is as yet so completely rolled only allows us to 
guess that the fates of races and the nature of new 
civilizations are bound up with the spread of Europe 
over America. 

The story of the early West Atlantic seaboard 
colonies is too familiar to require rehearsal here 
even if there were space and purpose for telling it. 
The object of this book is to deal in narrative fashion 
with a single thread of that transcontinental weav- 
ing of colonization which proceeded from the Atlan- 
tic to the Pacific in the latter part of the eighteenth 
and first part of the nineteenth centuries. This 
particular thread of the continental fabric was tied 
in 1805 to a certain point in Central Ohio to be 
known from that year as Granville. 

The reverse side of migration is invasion. The 
Indians of the Mississippi Valley and beyond were 
called upon, first of all, to face an invasion represent- 
ed by individual explorers, hunters, trappers, and 
traders. Through the report of this unorganized ad- 
vance-guard the white settlers east of the Alle- 



4 INTRODUCTION 

ghanies learned something of the regions beyond. It 
was inevitable that daring companies should set out 
for the great West with other purposes than those 
that governed the hunter and trader. The day of the 
colonist followed that of the vagrant adventurer. 
To secure, however, the proper political and social 
background of even one colony it is necessary to 
sketch briefly the outlines of the early history of 
the Middle West. 

France's claim to North America, due to Cartier's 
discovery of the St. Lawrence in 1534, naturally 
conflicted with the claim made by England which 
was based on Cabot's discoveries in 1497. Cartier's 
discoveries were strongly supported by those 
of the intrepid LaSalle made more than a 
hundred years later (1670) when he reached 
the Ohio River. In 1682 LaSalle floated down 
the "Messipi." His explorations of the Ohio 
and the Mississippi may deservedly be called the 
discovery of the great Middle West although De 
Soto had reached the Mississippi before him. The 
French government always based its claims to the 
Ohio Valley on the exploration made by LaSalle. 
Thus the official instructions sent to M. du Quesne 
in 1752 recited: 

The River Ohio, otherwise called the Beautiful River, and 
its tributaries belong indisputably to France by virtue of its 
discovery by Sieur de la Salle; of the trading posts the 
French have had there since; and of possession, which is so 
much the more unquestionable as it constitutes the most 
frequent communication from Canada to Louisiana. 

The struggle between France and England for 
ownership ended in 1763 when France formally 



INTRODUCTION 5 

ceded to England her possessions lying east of the 
Mississippi. Great Britain held these possessions 
only twenty years, that is, until the close of the 
Revolutionary War, 1783, when by the Paris Treaty 
of peace, British America was limited to the region 
north of the Great Lakes. Virginia, rather than the 
United States, technically acquired the Northwest 
through its several charters granted by James I, 
with dates ranging from 1606 to 1611. In 1783 the 
General Assembly of Virginia passed an Act author- 
izing the Virginia delegates in Congress to convey 
to the United States all the right of that Common- 
wealth to the territory northwestward of the river 
Ohio. March 1, 1784, Thomas Jefferson and three 
others, Virginia's delegates in Congress, did, as per 
deed of cession, "convey in the name of and for, and 
on behalf of, the said Commonwealth transfer, 
assign and make over unto the United States in 
Congress assembled, for the benefit of said States, 
Virginia inclusive, all right, title, and claim, as well 
of soil as of jurisdiction to the territoiy of said 
State lying and being to the northwest of the river 
Ohio." 

After such language as this, one may feel reason- 
ably sure that the said territory is w^ell and truly 
conveyed; though any holder of a deed to real 
estate in that region, considering the origin of his 
title, may be tempted to ask how James came by 
the land. 

It is impossible that France or England or the 
United States could have realized in the eighteenth 
century either how vast or how valuable was that 
territory northwest of the river Ohio. The New 



6 INTRODUCTION 

World was too new to Europeans for the full signi- 
ficance of its possession to be clear to them. Even 
in the second decade of the twentieth century, hav- 
ing been overrun rather than occupied, its possibili- 
ties are unrecognized by the majority of its inhabi- 
tants. The practical end of some forms of its 
exhaustible natural resources may be alarmingly 
near, but with a thriftier and more scientific system 
of agriculture, including reforestation, the old 
Northwest Territory shall yet afford prosperous 
homes to additional millions of citizens. 

Having thus secured title to this Virginia territory 
the United States pubhshed m July, 1787, "An Ord- 
inance for the government of the Territory of the 
United States north-west of the river Ohio." This 
document came to be known as the "Ordinance of 
'87," and for internal reasons it was also sometimes 
called the "Ordinance of Freedom." It provided a 
property qualification for the electorate and as- 
sumed that women were automatically politically 
outlawed through the circumstance of being women. 

This Ordinance of Freedom concludes with six 
"Articles of Compact" between the original States 
and the people and States In the said Territory "to 
remain forever unalterable unless by common con- 
sent." 

Article 1 relates to religious liberty and provides 
that "no person demeaning himself in a peaceable 
and orderly manner shall ever be molested on 
account of his mode of worship or rehgious senti- 
ments in said territory." From which we may infer 
that similarly he shall not be molested on account of 



INTRODUCTION 7 

lack of any mode of worship or absence of religious 
sentiments. 

Article 2 is substantially a bill of rights. "The 
inhabitants of the said territory shall always be 
entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus 
and of trial by jury, of a proportionate representa- 
tion of the people in the legislature, and of judicial 
proceedings according to the course of common law. 
All persons shall be bailable unless for capital 
offenses. All fines shall be moderate and no cruel 
or unusual punishment shall be inflicted. No man 
shall be deprived of his liberty or property but by 
the judgment of his peers or the law of the land." 

Article 3 provides that "religion, morality and 
knowledge being necessary to good government and 
the happiness of mankind, schools and the means 
of education shall forever be encouraged. The 
utmost good faith shall always be observed toward 
the Indians: their lands and property shall never be 
taken from them without their consent; and in their 
property, right and liberty, they shall never be in- 
vaded or disturbed unless in just and lawful wars 
authorized by Congress; but laws founded in 
justice and humanity shall, from time to time, be 
made for preventing wrongs being done them, and 
for preserving friendship with them." 

Article 6 declares that there shall be neither 
slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said terri- 
tory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, 
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. 
This article, however, concludes with one sinister 
proviso under which a fugitive-slave law might have 
been framed and justified. 



8 INTRODUCTION 

On the whole the Ordinance afforded a dependable 
basis for the constitutions of States that were to be 
formed out of the great Ten-itoiy. Barring its stu- 
pendous, albeit unintended, injustice to women it 
was a document of "civilization, and therewith citi- 
zenship — the skill to behave in a civilized world," as 
Professor Myres, author of the Dawn of History, 
so felicitously defines citizenship. 



pArt i. 



WILD TURKEY PERIOD 



CHAPTER 1. 
EARLY OHIO 

"They said, the Buckeye leaves expand 
Five-fingered as an open hand, 
Of love and brotherhood the sign — 
Be welcome! What is mine is thine!" 

The early history of Ohio would be somewhat 
simplified if there were any records of the precolon- 
ial settlers. But hardly more is known of the 
individual "squatters" than of the ever-roving 
trappers and hunters. These frontiersmen recog- 
nized no law or land-title except what was termed 
the "tomahawk-right," registered with a tomahawk 
on a forest tree. They made small clearings, built 
cabins, raised crops for a few years and then per- 
haps moved on to some other point. As a rule they 
antagonized the Indians who shrewdly perceived the 
nature and consequences of the coming of this 
white-faced foe. Historical justice — -the only kind 
now possible— will never be done the Indians of the 
Ohio Valley until it is frankly admitted that the 

9 



10 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

white man was an invader, opening his invasion by 
doing wanton injury and provoking violence in re- 
turn. The story of the devoted but ill-fated Mora- 
vians affords the chief if not the only record of 
honor on the part of the coming people in those 
years preceding 1787. The Moravians must be 
regarded as forming the first company settlement; 
they were also the first whites to discover a way of 
justice and humanity for dealing with the Indians; 
but they, in common with their Indian friends, fell 
victims to savage white men. 

It should not surprise us that the Indians fought 
desperately and in their own fashion for the lands of 
their fathers. It was a defence that would have 
been honored as nobly patriotic if made by any 
European people. But in a racial struggle so un- 
equal there could be only one outcome. In their 
defeat at the battle of Fallen Timbers, 1794, the 
Indians recognized their fate. The treaty made the 
following summer was signed by ninety chiefs and 
delegates from twelve tribes, including the two 
famous chiefs, Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue 
Jacket of the Shawanees; while their conqueror, 
General Wayne, signed for the white man's govern- 
ment. Perpetual peace and amity were declared; 
the tribes placed themselves under the protection 
of the United States, trading territory for sums of 
money agreed upon and the prescribed "protection." 
The settlement of the Indian troubles, added to 
the formation of the Northwestern Territory, led 
naturally and promptly to a distinct movement for 
colonization. Indeed, various companies of colon- 
ists were already on Ohio soil prior to the Treaty 



EARLY OHIO 11 

of 1795. The Ohio Land Company, formed in 
Massachusetts, purchased a large tract of land in 
1787, — the same year, it will be observed, that the 
Ordinance was passed. The actual group of 
pioneers representing this Ohio Land Company, un- 
der the leadership of Rufus Putnam, established a 
settlement on the banks of the Muskingum in 1788. 
"I have seen no place that pleases me so well for 
settlement as Muskingum," reported one of the 
Company's explorers; and there at the point where 
the first large northern tributary enters the Ohio 
they built Marietta the buckeye State's earhest 
town. Washington's estimate of the group led by 
Putnam is probably just and unexaggerated : "they 
were men to whom education, religion, freedom, 
private and public faith, which they incorporated in 
the fundamental compact of Ohio, were the primal 
necessities of life." 

Later in 1788 John Symmes with a company of 
thirty colonists having for their destination the val- 
ley of the Big Miami started from New Jersey, 
crossed the mountains and struck out for the Miami 
country, a region that had been described to them as 
"the fairest meadows that ever can be." 

During the next fifteen years settlers either as 
single families or in groups made their way into the 
region north of the Ohio, usually coming down the 
river by boat to the mouths of the northern tribu- 
taries and then ascending these streams. Thus 
settlements were made on the Muskingum, the 
Scioto, the Big Miami and the Little Miami. These 
streams were natural thoroughfares and gave access 
to the interior before anything that could be called 



12 WILD TURI^YS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

a road was yet in existence through the dense for- 
ests. These pioneers came from Massachusetts 
and Connecticut, from New Jersey and Pennsyl- 
vania, from Maryland and Virginia and Kentucky. 
The population of the new Territory was thus 
composite from the start. 

Due to this train of migration the Territory 
governmentally organized inl788 was able to show, 
fourteen years later, a sufficient population between 
the Ohio River and Lake Erie to justify the forma- 
tion of a State, and in 1803 Ohio was admitted to 
the Union. Thirty-five men formed the Constitu- 
tional Convention and drafted the Constitution 
which was adopted by unanimous vote, November 
29, 1802. By the enabling Act of Congress this was 
final and a reference to a popular vote was not 
required. A proposition to submit the Constitution 
to the electors was, however, introduced but defeat- 
ed by a vote of 7 to 27. Thus the Constitution went 
into effect at once. But even if the members of the 
Convention had recognized the essentially undemo- 
cratic character of their action and had been with- 
out authority for such action it would have been 
most difficult to submit the proposed Constitution to 
the electorate for ratification or rejection. The 
people were scattered here and there through the 
forest with trails rather than roads and little travel- 
ing at that; for most of them Chillicothe was a long 
way off, through the woods, as measured by facili- 
ties for letters or messengers. In so far as they 
concerned themselves with political developments 
in their wild wide country they knew that their 
delegates would undoubtedly enact a constitution 



EARLY OHIO 13 

based on and in harmony with the Ordinance of '87. 
And, as the sequel showed, Ohio did become the 
first-fruits of that Ordinance. 

One of the immediate expressions in recognition 
of the advantage of having an actual State to settle 
in was the formation of the Scioto Land Company 
in 1804. This company was formed at Granville, 
Massachusetts, a town in the southeastern part of 
the Berkshire Hills. As their name indicated they 
proposed a settlement in the Scioto Valley, but as 
matters turned out, the tract actually selected was 
on a small stream which, with others, forms a west- 
ern tributary of the Muskingum River; they there- 
fore changed their name to the Licking Land Com- 
pany and under that title their Constitution was 
adopted. 

In the spring of 1805 an exploring and surveying 
party was sent out by this land company to select 
and purchase a tract for the proposed colony. 
These agents selected and bought 29,040 acres in 
the valley of Racoon Creek, one of the "forks" of 
Licking River, the Muskingum tributary above 
mentioned. By an Act of Congress in 1796 a broad 
belt of land — more than two and a half million acres 
running east and west through the centre of the 
region which was to become the State of Ohio — 
had been set apart to satisfy certain claims of the 
officers and soldiers of the Revolutionary War. 
This tract known as the "United States Military 
Lands" became available for buyers and settlers, 
and it was from these lands that the Licking Land 
Company made their selection. 



14 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

While yet in Massachusetts the Company provided 
through their Constitution that in laying out the 
new village a town plot should be reserved; also, a 
school lot of 100 acres for the support of schools in 
the village; also, a minister's lot of 100 acres for 
the support of "the gospel ministration within the 
purchase of the Company." It is further recorded 
that all mill-seats were to be reserved — a significant 
instance of pioneer municipal ownership, to which 
was later added another case : when the town spring 
was deeded to the town for public use forever. After 
the report of the surveying and purchasing agents 
to the Company in Granville preparations for the 
move were made, and September of that same year, 
1805, found the emigrants on the road. 



CHAPTER II. 
A VANGUARD OF NEIGHBORS 

They blaze the trail, they find the ford, 
For camp-fires new a spring beside; 
Share corn and meat, their frugal hoard- 
True comrades in a wood so wide. 

In order to realize that the Granville colonists 
were not going into an absolutely unbroken wilder- 
ness it is important to note chronologically some 
of the various pioneers who were already located 
in the upper valley of the Licking and its "Middle 
Fork," the Raccoon; and who, consequently, would 
be neighbors of the new-comers. 

In the spring of 1798 Elias Hughes, born on the 
Potomac, and John Ratliff, a nephew of Hughes, 
with their families moved to a point some twenty 
miles up the Licking from its mouth. They put 
up their cabins on the north bank of the river about 
four miles east of the place where Newark was later 
built. Theirs was, so far as is known, the first 
white settlement in the territoiy which now forms 
Licking County. The location chosen was a spot 
which, once discovered, could hardly fail to attract 
and hold them. Any first frontiersman searching 
for a cultivable island in the forest sea would be 
satisfied after reaching "Bowling Green" as the 
place was presently called. It was a level, untim- 

15 



16 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

bered bit of prairie ready for planting — probably an 
old corn-field which Indians had earlier made. The 
two white men at once proceeded to raise a crop on 
their ready acres. During the next ten years or 
more the Bowling Green must have been a welcome 
feature that broke the monotony of the journey for 
all pioneers coming up the Licking trail. 

Incidents relating to the arrival of certain colon- 
ists who were more directly connected with the 
settlement of Granville township may be described 
in Heniy Bushnell's words: 

One evening in the late autumn of 1800 a settler from the 
valley below was threading his way through the forest along 
Ramp Creek, a tributary of the south fork of Licking River, 
hunting for deer, when he came unexpectedly on a camp-fire. 
Around it were gathered five men: Benoni Benjamin and 
three brothers-in-law — John Jones, Phineas Ford, Frederick 
Ford — and the fifth a man in Mr. Jones's employ. They were 
exploring with a view to settlement, having left their families 
back on the Scioto. John Jones was a Welshman, born in 
New Jersey, and the visitor was Isaac Stadden who after- 
wards became the first Justice of the Peace acting within 
the limits of Licking County. These two men soon recog- 
nized each other as old acquaintances, having been school- 
mates in their boyhood in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. 

Having found a locality that pleased him Jones 
brought on his family early in the spring of 1801, 
unaccompanied, however, by his friends who had 
selected places elsewhere. He built his cabin near 
a spring at the foot of a hill on land which after- 
wards became the Munson farm. This historic 
cabin "was about ten rods south of the spring, or 
halfway to the track of the road as first used. 
Centerville Street being afterwards laid out straight 



A VANGUARD OF NEIGHBORS 17 

through the plain now runs thirty or forty rods 
south of this spot". During the same summer, 18 01, 
Patrick Cunningham, from County Tyrone, Ireland, 
arrived and built the second cabin in the territory 
of Granville township to-be — about fifty rods north- 
east of the Jones cabin and near another spring. 
He is credited with setting out an orchard and cul- 
tivating fruits and vegetables. Bushnell remarks 
that in 1889 the remains of the cabin and nursery 
were still to be seen. One wonders how Cunning- 
ham was able to set out an orchard. Did he bring 
apple-seeds which he planted, or was he acquainted 
with some spot on the banks of the Licking or 
Muskingum rivers where Johnny Appleseed had 
done his horticultural missionary work. 

The next colonists to appear on the scene were 
also Welsh. Theophilus Rees and Thomas PhiUips, 
well-to-do citizens of Caermartlienshire, South 
Wales, had, in 1795, sold out and come to America, 
bringing with them many of their neighbors to 
whom they had supplied means for the journey. 
Brief stops were made in Chester County, Pennsyl- 
vania, and then in Cambria County. In 1801, or pos- 
sibly earlier, Rees and Phillips purchased from a 
Philadelphia dealer in western lands 2,000 acres in 
what is now the northeastern quarter of Granville 
township. Rees and a son-in-law visited their pur- 
chase in 1801. Later in the same year Mr. Rees sent 
his son John to put up a cabin and clear some land 
which he was to sow in wheat so as to furnish 
bread for the family upon their arrival the follow- 
ing year. John carried out this plan, cleared the 
land, sowed the seed wheat and harrowed it in by 



18 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

dragging brush over the ground with his own hands, 
his horse having strayed away. He then set out 
to return to Cambria County on foot. It is related 
that "arriving at the Ohio River near Port Pitt, now 
Pittsburgh, mucli to his surprise and very mucli to 
his gratification he found his horse standing on the 
bank patiently waiting for the waters to flow by so 
as to enable him to pursue his homeward journey. 
Prom that point man and horse went on together to 
their Cambrian home in the Alleghanies." 

In 1802 Theophilus Rees himself came out with 
his family, accompanied by his sons-in-law, David 
Lewis and David Thomas with their families. That 
first wheat-planting must have been fairly success- 
ful, for it is recorded that David Thomas carried a 
bushel of wheat on his back to Zanesville, a settle- 
ment on the Muskingum, and brought back the 
flour. Mrs. Rees then baked a wheaten loaf — the 
first made in the township. "The neighbors' chil- 
dren were all invited in to help eat it as a curiosity 
and luxury." These neighbors were certainly few 
and the children must have been mostly grand- 
children. 

About the same time came one Jimmy Johnson, 
from the vicinity of Wheeling, who bought land of 
Mr. Rees and built a cabin on it. In 1803 the Welsh 
settlement was further increased by two more 
families and in 1804 two sons-in-law of Jimmy John- 
son arrived. Meanwhile a man named Parker 
came from Virginia and built a cabin near the mouth 
of the stream later known as Clear Run, a point 
perhaps a mile and a half in a southwesterly direc- 
tion from John Jones's cabin. Parker cleared four 



A VANGUARD OF NEIGHBORS 19 

acres of ground and planted a patch of corn and 
garden vegetables. It is recorded tliat he hired a 
man to tend this garden-patch, though one is com- 
pelled to wonder where he found the man. At any 
rate, he went back for his family and brought them 
through safely to the new home ; but he himself 
lived only three weeks after reaching the spot he 
had chosen and worked on. The eldest son then 
took charge of the place and gathered the large 
crop of squashes which his father had planted. The 
squashes were piled in a rail pen with corn stacked 
about it for safety. A band of some fifty Indians 
were camped near and like kindly neighbors occa- 
sionally brought a haunch of venison to exchange 
for squash, so that Mrs. Parker and her children had 
sufficient food and some variety. They were not 
long without white neighbors, however, as another 
settler soon joined them and built a cabin near their 
own. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE PIONEER JOURNEY 

Adieu, my friends! Come on, my dears, 

This journey we'll forego, 
And settle Licking Creek, 

In yonder Ohio. 

TIMOTHY SPELMAN. 

This was the pioneer situation in the upper 
Racoon Valley in 1805 when the colonists repre- 
senting the Licking Land Company were ready to 
start from Granville, Massachusetts. The historian 
of that period commenting on the personnel of the 
emigrant party was moved to remark: 

We could spare our young ministers and young physicians 
and even our deacons, [sic'\ but when the strength and beauty 
of the church and parish were demanded the loss was irrepar- 
able. 

And James Cooley, in a Jubilee address at Gran- 
ville, Massachusetts, in 1845, says of those who 
went west forty years before : 

A long journey of seven hundred miles was before them. 
No railroads, no canals or steamboats. A mere overland 
journey through swamps and untrodden deserts; a constant 
toil by day and by night for more than forty days. But they 
were the chosen spirits of New England, legitimate sons of 
old Granville who shrunk at no hardship and feared no peril. 

20 



THE PIONEER JOURNEY 21 

"Swamps and untrodden deserts." One must 
regret that as late as 1845 any person could so 
describe the land through which the colonists were 
to journey. There were no deserts and the wilder- 
ness was such as to promise the blossoming rose. 
Cooley does not overstate, however, the pluck and 
hardihood of those Berkshire Hills pilgrims. They 
were of the same blood and spirit as the New Eng- 
landers who, more than a hundred and sixty years 
before (1643), had broken the "Old Connecticut 
Path" through the eastern wilderness from Boston 
to the lower valley of the Connecticut River. 

How did they outfit for the journey and for the 
home in that western country? These men were 
all of them well-to-do for their day, quite able to 
pay for their individual lots of land when the time 
came; but whatever their wealth in home-gear the 
capacity of their ox-drawn wagons must have been 
quickly reached, considering the nature of the roads 
they were to travel. Treasured pieces of furniture, 
prized books, unnecessary clothes and bedding, 
extra fann implements — all had to be left behind. 
There must be room for such tools and bedding as 
were indispensable, room for the Dutch oven, the 
iron kettle and the bags of flour and corn-meal. 
Spinning-wheels no less than axes and flint-lock 
muskets were on the list to go ; knitting-needles and 
garden-seeds had to be thought of, as well as the 
bible and hymn-book. And when everything else 
was in there must still be space for the little child- 
ren and others who could not walk all day. One 
gallant young mother, Ruth (Rose) Winchell, made 
the entire journey on horseback carrying in her 



22 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

arms her baby Rebecca, then less than a year old. 
Probably other mothers travelled in the same way. 
All things considered, it is hardly surprising that 
"the oldest among them were serious and provident 
and the youngest were moved to song by the 
romance of the situation." Timothy Spelman seems 
to have been their song writer and some of his 
verses — not wholly complimentary to the Berkshire 
country — were sung at their gatherings through 
the summer as preparations for departure were 
made. 

Instead of moving as one united company they 
divided into parties with short intervals of time 
separating the dates of going. In the month of 
September families began to leave in small com- 
panies for their six-weeks' journey. Their route 
from Granville, Massachusetts, lay southwestward, 
crossing the Hudson River at Fishkill Landing or 
Port Edward, thence over a point of New Jersey, 
across the Delaware at Easton, the Schuylkill at 
Reading, the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, by Car- 
lisle and over the Alleghanies, through Washington, 
Pennsylvania, across the Ohio at Wheeling, and on 
to Zanesville. From that settlement on up the valley 
of the Licking River there could have been hardly 
more than a trail, indicated by blazes on the trees, 
which had been made by the few wayfarers who had 
gone before them. Assuming that their trail was 
blazed by way of Bowling Green they undoubtedly 
passed through the small settlement of Newark lo- 
cated in 1802 where two creeks, the North Fork and 
South Fork, unite to form the Licking River. It seems 
probable that they forded the Raccoon Creek near 



THE PIONEER JOURNEY 23 

its junction with the South Fork, went through 
Cherry Valley and crossed the Raccoon again some 
two miles from the first ford, that is, some- 
where west of the point where the creek 
swung sharply against the hill in the base 
of which the "Dugway" was later made; and 
thus they entered the little plain east of the 
place already selected for the location of their 
village — practically at their journey's end. By such 
a route as this they would avoid all the hills on the 
right, westward from Newark, and a creek to be 
forded must have been much less of an obstacle 
than a hill to be climbed. 

The first company to arrive consisted of William 
Gavit, Elias Oilman, Levi Rose, James Thrall, Sam- 
uel Thrall, Silas Winchell, and their families. With 
them was Thomas Sill, a man without his family if 
he had any. They had been forty-four days on the 
road; it was Saturday, November 2, when they 
reached the Jones cabin, Saturday evening? one is 
led to ask. If so this would explain their stopping; 
for this premier group "kept the Sabbath through- 
out the journey stopping early Saturday evening so 
as to have all the preparations made and begin holy 
time at sundown according to their custom." At 
any rate they evidently halted at the hospitable and 
elastic Jones cabin and not only spent Sunday there 
— within two miles of their actual destination — but 
waited until November 12 when a second and larger 
party overtook them. The important event of this 
day, November 12, seems to have been a religious 
service, a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania 
happening to be on hand to conduct it. "Scarcely 



24 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

waiting to loosen the oxen from their yokes, or to 
eat, one hundred assembled for pubUc worship," 

The next day, November 13, 1805, they all 
"hitched up" and drove on, not by a straight trail as 
Centei'ville Street runs today; the ox-teams of 1805 
were not laying out a street, for they must have 
wound slowly and uncertainly among the great 
trees and made many detours to get past fallen ones. 
They forded Clear Run, probably at some point 
near the reserved mill-seat where the Winchell flour- 
ing-mill was later built, and keeping a last noble 
hill on their left they entered the public square-to- 
be and made their final camp. 

What were Ruth Rose's thoughts as she handed 
down the baby and slid from her horse for the last 
time? Was the exhilarating sense of rare adven- 
ture subdued by the certainty of toil and hardship 
in the life which she faced? It was mid-November 
and rain threatened. The next meal would have to 
be prepared as on so many days before, campers' 
fashion; then she with other mothers must plan 
to keep the children snug and dry. Did the wild 
beauty of her surroundings win its way through 
her senses to a responding heart? The darting fish 
in the pools, the scolding squirrels, the asters and 
goldenrods massed in untended glades and defiant 
of frost, the plump chestnuts and hazel nuts well 
out of their burs and strewn among the leaves, the 
friendly stars revealed after nightfall through 
breaks in the clouds that matched breaks in the 
forest roof — were all these able to spell their wel- 
come to the tired home-seeker? We shall never 
know, for she left no common record. It may well 



THE PIONEER JOURNEY 25 

be that, whether among the Berkshire Hills or those 
of central Ohio, Ruth Rose saw more than she 
mentioned and felt more than she told. There is 
a chance, more than an eighth of a chance, that 
traits of hers, passed down, account in a large part 
for certain traits in one of her descendants: Charles 
Willard Hayes, (1858-1916), leader of men, lover of 
nature, geologist. 



CHAPTER IV, 

A LAND OF PROMISE 

The connection between the physical features of a country 
and the history and temperament of its people has hardly 
received, either from historians or geologists, the attention 
which it deserves. Though not obtrusive, it is real and close, 
and amid other and more potent influences has never ceased 
to play its part in the moulding of national character and 
progress. 

—ARCHIBALD GEIKIE. 

To what sort of a land had the conduding miles of 
their journey brought the colonists? It was a 
favored country, geographically and geologically 
considered, for nowhere else along the entire south- 
ern boundary of the region formerly covered by the 
continental ice-sheet have the topographic effects 
of the great glaciation taken more kindly and 
advantageous forms than those that may be found 
in Granville township of Licking County, Ohio. A 
contour map of this county would show at a glance 
that Granville township lies on the limits of the hill 
country. Fifteen miles or even ten miles to the east 
the contours would indicate steeper slopes, higher 
hills, deeper valleys; while to the west they would 
exhibit the levels or wide low billows of land that 
reach to Columbus and far beyond. In Granville 
township there is plenty of rich "bottom" land 
bounded or broken by hills which are, however, not 

26 



A LAND OP PROMISE 27 

so steep as to interfere with pasturage needs. 
Stored away in these hills, conveniently near their 
tops, is a superior quality of freestone, the fine- 
grained Waverly — the region, geologically viewed, 
occuping an intermediate position between the Sub- 
carboniferous sandstones further to the east and the 
Devonian limestones on the west. 

Somewhere between eastern Massachusetts and 
central Ohio a brook becomes a "run" and a small 
river turns into a creek — acquiring incidentally the 
pronunciation "crick." At the bases of the Gran- 
ville hills numerous springs, valuable because deep- 
seated and pure, gave rise to runs which meandered 
across the lower lands to empty into the creek. The 
Raccoon, usually a gentle stream and of no great 
size, was nevertheless a dominant feature of the 
region on account of its relation to the neighboring 
topography. This creek had a valley within a valley. 
Beginning at the bases of the hills there were wide 
reaches of land, practically level, which dropped by 
a steep sharply-defined bluff to the bottoms 
through which the creek ran and which it over- 
flowed at times of high water — the spring freshets. 
The historical tense is here used, because it is pro- 
bable that not a few of the springs have been unable 
to survive the removal of the forest trees from their 
mother hills ; "the running brook is dry"— or nearly 
so, and today no one would need to search to find 
a place where he could cross the creek without 
swimming his horse. 

But to the colonists in 1805 more impressive than 
hills or streams was the forest. Everywhere, on 



28 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

the tops and sides of the hills, over the creek ter- 
races, over the bottoms to the water's edge, were 
trees, — units in a forest the like of which cannot 
possibly be seen again while civilization endures 
between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. 
Black walnuts, butternuts, chestnuts, oaks, hick- 
ories, maples, elms, beeches, white-woods, lindens, 
sycamores, poplars, ash, buckeyes, mulberries, 
cherries, locusts, dogwoods, struggled everywhere 
for standing-room, for elbow-room and for sun- 
shine. This list is not exhaustive, nor does it give 
the various species that may be covered by one 
name as in such cases, for instance, as the oak, the 
maple and the poplar ; but it indicates the marvelous 
wealth and variety of tree-life in that primeval 
forest. Shrubs and bushes supplemented the trees, 
yet not usually in such a way as to make an 
obstructing undergrowth. The papaws, hazelnuts, 
sassafras, grape-vines, black haws, elders and spice- 
bushes watched their chance and knew their place 
which they clung to with determination. Lowly 
yet lovelier plants gave the final touch of grace and 
beauty to this world of growing things. 

Furthermore, it was a country that had not been 
manhandled. Civilization had not entered and 
begun the strewing of its unsightly debris. The 
moccasined Indian slipping along his indistinct trail 
had not marked his camping-spots with tin cans 
and broken bottles, coal-ash heaps, discarded barbed 
wire and refuse papers. Only one who has searched 
for a clean spot — a bit of grass fit to rest on — in the 
suburbs of European cities and towns, or the United 
States towns, for that matter, can adequately appre- 



A LAND OF PROMISE 29 

ciate in imagination the cleanliness of the New 
West. The land was clean and the streams, large 
and small, were piira The sweet limpid waters of 
Clear Run were good enough for the baby's bath or 
the tea-kettle. Untainted it took its way over the 
shining little sand-bars or rested under wholesome 
clay banks where willow shadows fell until it joined 
its big brother the creek. Dearly loved Clear Run! 
Born of springs in the North hills and singing along 
to the Raccoon, what indignities have been offered 
you in this hundred years. Who will now believe 
that you were once well named? The white man's 
civilization has wronged you into kinship with 
sewers and factory drains; but you shall at least 
run through these pages with all the purity that was 
yours in prehistoric times. 

Why did these Granville colonists select for their 
town a spot so hemmed in? They must have seen 
that that last high hill which they had passed, along 
with "Sugar Loaf," its companion hill on the west, 
would firmly put a stop to east-and-west streets 
that might wish to continue on a straight and fairly 
level course; while the range of hills to the north 
quite forbade convenient growth in that direction. 
Southward a growing town would promptly drop 
down to the freshet-swept bottoms. Had the 
Centerville plain with its ample reaches been chosen 
the early rivalry between Granville and Newark for 
place as the official town of the county might have 
resulted in favor of the former. In that case, Gran- 
ville could hardly have been the Granville of this 
story. We are not left, however, to speculate on 



30 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

the motives of the settlers. One early historian, 
Jacob Little, says: 

The Company having heard much of the fever and ague as 
well as the fertility of the West, wished a location which 
would avoid the evil and secure the good; contain hills for 
health and level land for fertility. The level borders of the 
creek through the centre of the township with the rising 
hills at a little distance on both sides governed the agents 
in the selection of this place. 

In other words the curious group of hills where 
Granville nestles served to attract rather than to 
repel. It is also not unlikely that the large spring 
which the exploring agents must have discovered 
at the foot of one of the north hills was no small 
factor in determining the site of the town. This 
spring was probably much larger than either of the 
springs near the Jones cabin. An abundance of 
good water at hand was even more a consideration 
with the frontiersman in locating his cabin than it 
is with the modern explorer in pitching his camp 
for a night or a week. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE WILDERNESS HOME 

Tell me a tale of the timber-lands — 

Of the old-time pioneers; 

Somepin' a pore man understands 

With his feelin's well as ears. 

Tell of the old log house — about 

The loft and the puncheon flore — 

The old fi-er-place, with its crane swung out. 

And the latch-string through the door. 

—JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. 

Henry Bushnell probably secured for his History 
of Granville all the facts that will ever be available 
so far as the history of those first days and the 
earliest years is concerned. From his records, based 
on oral or written accounts, we know about the 
cutting of that first tree, the beech, when the men 
properly enough took turns at swinging the axe as 
if it w^ere some communal ceremony. That shelter 
for four families, made by putting poles across from 
the fallen tree to stake supports with brush and 
blankets to form the roof, must have been the 
model of temporary shelter for all the others. It 
rained for the first three nights, the roofs leaked 
and the brush-piles on which their beds were spread 
rested in water. But they had arrived. No more 
yoking of the patient oxen to go forward on a trail. 
All effort now could be spent in making themselves 

31 



32 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

comfortable for the approaching winter. In the 
midst of their camp labors the Sabbath came, — 
there were no Sundays in early Granville, only Sab- 
baths. This first day of rest was a memorable one 
for people who had organized their colonial church 
the preceding May and had enjoyed the privilege of 
having a special sermon preached for them before 
setting out on their journey. Any public service 
would need to be in the open air, but there was the 
stump of the beech-tree ready for use as the essen- 
tial part of a pulpit. An hour was appointed and 
the horn gave the signal for the gathering of a con- 
gregation that numbered ninety-three. Two ser- 
mons were read by Mr. Rathbone, one of which was, 
most appropriately, the sermon that Dr. Cooley had 
preached more than six months before at the organ- 
ization of their church. The prayers were offered 
by Timothy Rose, Lemuel Rose and Samuel Thrall. 
It is a family tradition that Silas Winchell's wife 
was a sweet singer and that she led the singing that 
day. At any rate, they sang and the story is that 
the sound of the music rose to the hilltops where 
Theophilus Rees was hunting for a lost cow or two. 
The far-off lowing of the colonists' oxen led him in 
their direction until he heard the singing. Looking 
cautiously over the brow of the hill he saw strangers 
gathered for a meeting. Without making himself 
known he hurried home to tell his wife that "they 
had some new neighbors, of whom she need not be 
afraid, for they had got the ark of God among 
them." If this stoiy is not true it is good enough 
to be true; and one hesitates to point out the 
improbability that so large a company of settlers 



THE WILDERNESS HOME 33 

could arrive at the Jones cabin, stay ten days, be 
reenforced by a larger company, and then move 
on a couple of miles to their destination without 
Deacon Rees's knowing all about his new neighbors 
— even though he spoke no English. 

By December 10, 1805, the members of the Com- 
pany were ready for the division of their land. At 
public auction bids were made for choices. The 
land was valued to every member of the Company 
at $167.30 per hundred acres, each one paying, in 
addition to this, for his choice of location whatever 
he bid. Each one hundred acres drew a town lot 
and for the choice of these, bids were again received. 
The total amount of "choice" money was subse- 
quently divided among the members according to 
the quantity of land each one purchased. Some 
paid nearly as much for their choice as they did for 
their land, while others paid nothing for a choice. 
The first farm lot, bid off by Timothy Spelman, was 
the one adjoining the town on the northeast, — plain- 
ly desirable not merely on account of its nearness 
to town but chiefly because Clear Run watered it. 
The largest purchase as regarded acres was that of 
Jesse Munson who received a deed for 1500 acres 
at the Company's price. With his bids added, his 
tract cost him $3,043.80. This Jesse Munson was 
advanced in years and only came to be with his 
children. It is told that when the colonists crossed 
the Ohio at Wheeling he was disappointed in the 
soil and looks of the new country and muttered, "If 
they hadn't anything better than that to show him 
he should give them a big gun and go back again." 
But when they reached the Licking Valley his feel- 



34 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

ings changed; he would get out and examine the 
soil with his hands, even smelling and tasting it, 
expressing the greatest satisfaction. Upon reach- 
ing the Jones cabin he decided that there would be 
the place for him to anchor, and he said "he would 
have that farm." Being a man of determination as 
well as means he got it and on it he spent the 
remainder of his life. Jesse Munson also secured 
the town lot containing the great spring; \\dth 
admirable public spirit he gave a lien to the 
Company providing that the spring should be for 
community use "as long as water runs." It may 
be added here that Elias Oilman coming a little 
later into possession of this spring lot confirmed 
Jesse Munson's intention of public ownership by 
giving a deed in which he renounced all title to the 
spring and as much ground around it as might be 
needed for water-works, if the inhabitants should 
thereafter see fit to use the spring for public good. 

There seems to have been no dissatisfaction with 
the working of their land-division scheme. By 
trades and private sales each member was satisfied. 
In a letter dated January 15, 1806, Timothy Rose 
wrote: We have come to the division of our land, 
and that peaceably; and, as I believe, honestly. 

With community needs in mind early action was 
taken to get a school-house ready for the winter. 
No other community action indicates more distinct- 
ly what stuff these colonists were made of; for 
certainly most groups under like circumstances 
would have said: "Next year, next spring; we can 
do nothing for the present except to keep ourselves 
warm and supplied with food." But in very early 



THE WILDERNESS HOME 35 

Granville education was a business that would not 
admit of postponement. Samuel Thrall, Lemuel 
Rose and Elias Oilman were made a committee; as 
a result of their planning a large log house was 
built on the south side of the public square. "This 
was a magnificent building," says one who attended 
the school which was taught the latter half of the 
winter by Mr. Rathbone; "the windows were of oiled 
paper, the seats were shaved puncheons laid on 
blocks, and the desks were of the same, fixed to the 
logs of the house at a suitable height by pins set in 
auger-holes." The building was also used for 
religious meetings and town gatherings; so it must 
have been the heart of the settlement in those first 
months. The first teacher — and reader of sermons 
— was probably Thomas Rathbone who came with 
the company which arrived November 12. 

Another primary and urgent need, though a more 
material one, was water-power mills both for sawing 
logs and grinding grain. In anticipation of this the 
Company had sent out a small party — five men with 
their families — in the hope that one or more mills 
might be in operation on the aiTival of the colony. 
Bushnell writes: 

They were Timothy Spelman, Cornelius Slocum, John 
Phelps, Ethan Bancroft and Hugh Kelley. Mr. Bancroft 
found shelter for his family in one of the cabins at the 
mouth of Clear Run. Mr. Phelps and Mr. Spelman in the 
Jones and Cunningham cabins, and the others here and 
there. Mr. Spelman seems to have had an oversight of all 
the workmen, and charge of all the Company's work; and 
in his absence this care devolved on Mr. Slocum. Mr. Phelps 
was the millwright and Mr. Kelley the blacksmith. They put 
up a sawmill about sixty rods below the mouth of Clear Run, 



36 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

on the left bank of Raccoon. The creek made a bend to the 
south and back again to its original course, and across the 
neck of the bow was a natural sluice-way which they used 
for a feed-race. They made a dam at the entrance of this 
cut-across by setting sycamore logs on end, inclining down 
stream, and secured a fall of a few feet. But the freshets 
were too much for the anchorage of the sycamore logs, and 
the bed of the stream was soon washed clear of them. . . . 
Afterward, the mill was removed to the head of the cut- 
across, which was made the tail-race; and, as the first dam 
had proved a failure, they tried one made of brush. This 
lived to see the saw run part way through the first log when 
a freshet came and it, too, was swept away. 

There was no sawmill when the colonists arrived 
— only a story of western freshets — though the 
millwright had evidently done his best. By some 
pecuhar reasoning they seem to have concluded 
that Nature or Providence in the form of high 
waters would be more indulgent to a scheme of 
private ownership. They therefore offered at public 
sale their mill-seat at the mouth of Clear Run 
"together with the mill, the machinery and all the 
appurtenances." It is recorded, however, that fol- 
lowing this sale "the citizens turned out for the 
public good and helped James Thrall, into whose 
possession the mill-seat had come, to put in a third 
dam, made of logs and heavily covered with gravel 
which succeeded better than the others." It is 
noteworthy that they so easily lost faith in a com- 
munity enterprise which, under individual owner- 
ship, required the public shoulder at the wheel to 
make it go. 

Samuel Everitt, Jr., returning to Massachusetts 
for his family, added to the equipment of the Thrall 
mill by bringing out a new saw blade. The first 



THE WILDERNESS HOME 37 

lumber sawed with it was therefore given to Mr. 
Everitt who used it in building a house some two 
miles west of town on lower Loudon Street. He 
consequently had the distinction of living in the 
first frame house or, more properly, plank house 
built in the township. The planks were placed 
upright and dovetailed into the sills and plates; the 
cracks were battened and later the structure was 
weather-boarded with wide boards. Such a pioneer 
house did no doubt deserve the honor of the rose- 
bush which was brought from Massachusetts and 
planted by the east window. 

This same Samuel Everitt, besides bringing his 
family and the saw blade and the rose-bush, brought 
also the town library which he had been commis- 
sioned to purchase. We are told that these books, 
"being of a high order, were a source of improve- 
ment to their many readers for succeeding years." 

The Everitt plank house could not long have 
remained the only one of its kind; for besides the 
Thrall sawmill one was built by Augustine Munson 
in 1806 on the creek about two and a half miles east 
of town. The Munson mill could turn out 4000 feet 
of lumber per day. 

As for grist-mills the colonists' main reliance in 
the very first years was a mill in Newark. It was 
women's work not merely to bake the loaves of corn- 
meal, but first to go miles on horseback to a mill 
with a bushel or two of grain to be ground. This, 
that the men need not leave their heavier work. In 
an adjoining township (Union) Phineas Ford — one 
of the men who sat around that Ramp Creek camp- 
fire in 1800— built a grist-mill on Ramp Creek, mak- 



38 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

ing millstones out of glacial boulders found in the 
fields. There is apparently no record that the 
Granville people resorted to this mill, though it 
would be strange if they did not do so; for it must 
have been quite as near as Newark and, also. Ford 
had an orchard of fruit-trees grown from seeds 
which he had brought with him from New England ; 
some of the first apple-trees planted in Granville 
were taken from the Ramp Creek nursery. Thus 
the neighbors on the north were not unacquainted 
with the Ford place, nor was the road thither an 
untraveled one. 

In their struggles with the creek, the most obvious 
source of water-power, the possibilities of Clear Run 
were apparently overlooked for a time, but about 
1811 Daniel Baker established on the little stream 
a shop for the manufacture of wooden dishes. 
Plates, porringers, bowls and spoons were here 
made, the dishes being turned upon a lathe run by 
water. Again, about 1816, a flouring-mill was 
started by Grove Case and Silas Winchell. This 
mill stood a few hundred feet from the point where 
the Newark road crossed the run. A head of water 
was secured by damming the stream a short 
distance northwest of the mill and forming a con- 
siderable pond there. Later a carding-mill was 
added to the grist-mill. And at least once more 
Clear Run was put under bonds for a supply of 
energy. A dam below the grist-mill with a long 
head-race winding around the foot of the opposite 
hill gave water to a sawmill built in what must 
have been the neighborhood of the Parker cabin. 
This particular sawmill stood near Raccoon Creek, 



THE WILDERNESS HOME 39 

but was wholly dependent on Clear Run for its 
power. 

Distilleries were early erected and there seems 
to have been no public or private disapproval of the 
drinking habit until about 1830 when temperance 
reform began to be agitated. Indeed, whiskey was 
regarded as one of the necessaries of life, taking 
rank with meal and meat. In the first winter four 
leading men of the settlement made a toilsome 
journey through the woods to ChiHicothe, a distance 
of sixty miles. They went with their ox-teams and 
were four days in traveling the first twenty-six miles 
when they reached Lancaster. The round trip re- 
quired three weeks ; but they secured flour and with 
it what they no doubt prized as much — a supply of 
whiskey. 

While there were apparently some whiskeyless 
days and flourless days the colonists knew no meat- 
less ones. The woods in which these new homes 
were built abounded in game. Bushnell writes: 

Wild turkeys were so plentiful as to become a pest to 
crops. They went in flocks to the size of a hundred, and some 
of the settlers say five hundred. When they began to sow, 
there are instances of where the sower set down his wheat 
to club back the turkeys. In the Autumn, the Burg Street 
hills echoed with their noise, and sometimes seemed almost 
covered with them. The people did not pretend to eat all 
they killed. The breasts were torn out for 'jerks,' that is, 
to smoke and dry, and the rest was thrown away. Those 
who could not bear to see the waste forbade their young 
people firing on them. So late as 1811, six years after the 
settlement, Enoch Graves paid Spencer Wright nine fat 
turkeys, caught in a pen, for three pounds of sole leather. 
A turkey that had been shot came flying overhead and flut- 



40 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

tered down by the side of Mrs. Winchell, while at work out 
of doors. It was unable to fly further, and so furnished them 
a dinner. When dressed it weighed twenty-two pounds. A 
peddler from Chillicothe stopped at Owen Granger's tavern 
one Monday noon, where he saw several fine turkeys. He 
bargained with Leveret Butler for one hundred such, to be 
delivered at Mr. Granger's the next Saturday noon. Butler 
went home, run his bullets, went out in the afternoon and 
in two hours killed twenty-nine. A rain came up arid wet 
the guns, and he was obliged to stop. He hung up the 
turkeys after the Indian fashion, sticking the head of one 
through a slit in the neck of another, and balancing them 
across a limb. Next day it rained. Wednesday he went 
again with one Nichols, and camped out the rest of the week. 
They cari'ied in one hundred and thirty. The wild cats 
spoiled six for them. Selecting one hundred of the best, he 
delivered them to Mr. Granger and received his pay. Mrs. 
Samuel Everitt caught twenty-three turkeys at one time, 
trapping them in a corn crib, luring them to the spot by 
sprinkling a few kernels of corn around. Deacon David 
Thomas killed seven with two shots, having a shot gun and 
getting the turkeys in a row as they sat on the fence. Old 
Mr. Hoover had the name of killing the largest in the colony. 
When dressed it weighed thirty-eight pounds. Mr. Ethan 
Bancroft shot several that weighed thirty-six pounds. 

These turkey stories are worth passing on as an 
evidence of the great abundance of this noblest of 
game-birds in early Ohio. But there were too many 
shot-guns, too many ever-enlarging bare spots 
where a strange new enemy strewed grain but 
carried a club. The turkey was of the wilderness 
and in a few decades he was gone from a habitat 
that was no longer his unmolested home. 

Besides the turkeys there were deer, wild hogs, 
opossums, and an occasional bear, so that the meat 
diet w^as not without variety. The wolf stories and 
rattlesnake records clearly show that the back- 



THE WILDERNESS HOME 41 

woodsman's life was more or less beset with 
dangers, whether on the road or in the woods or 
around his cabin. To exterminate the rattlers and 
fight the wolves was merely an item in the program 
for conquering the country. An illustrative incident 
occurred in the life of Alfred Avery, the boy who 
had now found a land where there was "dirt enough 
to cover the corn." Alfred, having reached the 
mature age of eleven, was sent one day on horse- 
back, to the mill at Newark. Returning belated, 
some animal rushed past him in the darkness and 
startled his horse, throwing boy and grist to the 
ground. With the aid of a fallen tree Alfred suc- 
ceeded in readjusting his load, and so reached home 
in safety. The animal was believed to be a wolf 
which happily was not hungry enough to make an 
attack on horse or boy at that time. Whatever the 
animal was, the incident has value as indicating that 
the grist-mill at Nev/ark was early patronized by the 
Granville folk, — even children taking the risk of the 
six-mile ride through the woods to get the necessary 
meal ground. 

How did life proceed with these colonists, self- 
planted in a tremendous forest, with next to no 
exports or imports, with stump-dotted trails instead 
of roads, thrown on their own resources and 
equipped with only a slender stock of tools and 
materials? It is plain that, to begin with, their 
main dependence must be agriculture, and that 
meant the clearing of patches in the forest. The 
fires of destruction were kept going night and day, 
the year around, just to get rid of timber which a 
century later would be sorely needed. The magni- 



42 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

ficent forest yielded to this treatment and in a few 
years there were spots at least where annual crops 
could be grown. One common way to get rid of the 
trees was to make a "deadening." All the trees in a 
tract were girdled and left standing. As the trees 
thus treated soon died, root and branch, the ground 
was no longer shaded by annual foliage, and corn 
and other crops could be raised among the dead 
standing timber. This practice of making dead- 
enings w^as kept up for at least fifty years. As late 
as 1860 there were large tracts of these dead trees 
west of Granville. It was a weird and pathetic 
sight, — so many great trees stretching their gaunt 
and lifeless limbs to the sky as if in protest against 
the waste and desolation. 

The first houses built were naturally of logs with 
few rooms, — one large room serving, like the Roman 
atrium, as the place for carrying on many household 
operations. The women prepared a break-of-day 
breakfast in this room while the men were out to 
feed the stock and give the fires a start. The main 
breakfast dish seems to have been fresh "johnny- 
cake." As Bushnell tells it: 

The corn meal was stirred up with water and a little white 
ashes of elm wood or corn-cobs, instead of soda, or a pseudo 
pearlash made by firing a hollow elm log, the heat becoming 
so great as to melt down the ashes in cakes. The johnny- 
cake was then spread thin upon a short shaved puncheon. 
This was set on end before the fire until one side was baked 
brown, then turned and baked on the other. Sometimes the 
rain (coming down the wide chimney?) would spoil one cake, 
but another would be started at once. When done it was 
dipped in cold water and immediately rolled up in a cloth to 
steam awhile, and when it came out "it was the sweetest 



THE WILDERNESS HOME 43 

bread ever made." Potatoes were roasted in the ashes. The 
breast of turkeys was cut into slices and broiled on the 
end of a stick or lying on glowing coals. When there was no 
fresh meat at hand, there was plenty of jerked venison or 
turkey. 

Johnny-cake, baked potatoes and turkey. No 
mean breakfast for hard-working people, though 
coffee, butter and fruit are not mentioned. For the 
noonday meal the breakfast bill of fare was 
repeated, and presumably supper varied but little, 
if any, from the two preceding meals. When a real 
baking-day arrived the women generally used a 
Dutch oven ; that is, a shallow, wide-spreading bake- 
kettle with a close-fitting cover. This oven was set 
over a bed of coals and then covered with a layer of 
coals. Some people used more ample clay ovens 
that could accommodate eight or ten loaves of bread 
at a time. 

Besides using the Indian corn in the form of meal 
ground at some mill, this corn was prepared as 
hominy. A mortar was made by burning in some 
convenient stump a hollow large enough to hold a 
gallon or two; a bent sapling and a heavy pestle 
fixed so as to play over the stump, with a rope and 
stirrup for footwork, completed the hominy ma- 
chine. 

Bread and meat accounted for, luxuries were 
found in maple sugar, nuts, dried wild grapes and 
wild cherries, and, in their season, blackberries, mul- 
berries and elderberries, — together with cranberries 
which friendly Indians brought in for sale. Finally, 
when the young apple-trees began to bear, the 
pioneer's table called for nobody's pity. 



44 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

Even as dinner was like breakfast, the work of 
the afternoon was a continuation of the work of the 
forenoon. According to the season, the men 
plowed the ground, or cultivated their crops, or 
harvested them, on the ever-enlarging clearings; 
chopping intermittently and burning the felled trees 
continuously. The women cooked and cleaned, but 
their main work between meals was spinning wool 
and flax, weaving the spun yam into cloth and fi- 
nally making the cloth into garments and bedding. 
The girls were spinsters at sixteen and spinsters 
still after they were married. Their best ginghams 
— Sabbath-day ginghams — were made by using 
hetcheled flax; the coarser tow was for every-day 
wear. Shirts and trousers and skirts must have 
been easier to come by than leather shoes; for the 
habit of going barefooted— at least in warm weather 
— was general for both old and young. People 
started to church carrying their shoes and stockings 
which they put on when they reached the edge of 
the village. "But the most daring of the men 
sometimes came barefoot and in their shirt-sleeves." 

The lack of the simplest of modern essentials — 
window-glass, friction matches, baking-powder, 
tinware, cotton cloth, tooth-brushes, rubber over- 
shoes — called forth ingenuity rather than com- 
plaints. These frontier people were without anaes- 
thetics in childbirth and without antiseptics for daily 
hurts. Listerine, carbolated vaseline, extract of 
witch-hazel — the commonest articles on the family 
medicine-shelf today— were wholly unknown to 
them. But mother-wit, the oldest of all forms of 
wit, stood by. Pioneers knew the healing roots and 



THE WILDERNESS HOME 45 

leaves of the woods; they knew the therapeutic 
value of mutton tallow and hot water. 

The men toiled unremittingly and were old while 
yet young in years; but when one considers the 
work of the women, the conditions under which 
their work was done, and remembers that the care 
of babies and little children was a part of that worlt, 
it is safe to say that the women carried the heavy 
end of the load of frontier life. They were, of 
course, without cooking stoves, or indeed stoves of 
any sort; and that meant much stooping to 
cook on the coals of the fireplace with the 
face and especially the eyes subjected to an 
injurious heat. From this excess of heat they 
went to bedrooms that were bitterly cold 
if it were winter. It goes without saying that 
their cabins were wholly lacking in bathing and 
other sanitary appointments. But in health or out 
of it, having some "things to do with" and lacking 
many others, these women made the best of their 
wilderness conditions and devotedly saw their job 
through to its end, leaving it to their children's 
children to beat the record of thrift and devotion If 
they could. Unconsciously and incidentally they 
furnished reenforcing data for Dr. Dudley Sargent's 
assertion that "notwithstanding cold, or thirst, or 
hunger, or physical privation of any sort, a woman 
can outlast a man." 



CHAPTER VI. 
THE PIONEER MOTIVE 

And now I have a sheep and a cow, everybody bids ' 

me good morrow. 

—POOR RICHARD. 

Men to whom education, religion, freedom, private 
and public faith were the primal necessities of life. 

—WASHINGTON. 

Reviewing the circumstances of the first years one 
is impelled to ask : Why did tliese people of the Berk- 
shires do it? Why did they leave their comfortable 
dwellings, their white-painted tall-spired church, 
and come so far to all this privation and toil. They 
certainly had no social or political dissatisfaction 
with their Massachusetts home. What was prob- 
ably the chief purpose of the migration is revealed 
in an incident in the New England life of one of the 
future colonists, Alfred Avery. "When he was a 
mere child his father went out to plant corn, and 
himself, anxious to help, took his hoe and went out 
also, tugging and sweating to do what a little boy 
could. At length his father noticed that Alfred was 
crying and asked him what was the matter. The 
child's reply was a turning-point in the history of the 
family. *I can't get dirt enough to cover the corn.' 
Then the father thought it was time to go where the 
world had more dirt. Soon afterward he became a 
member of the Licking Land Company." 

46 



THE PIONEER MOTIVE 47 

These colonists were one with the Cro-Magnons 
and the rest of the long line of migrating peoples 
in responding to the lure of land further on where 
they hoped to improve their condition and that of 
their children as regarded the primary needs of life : 
food, clothing, and shelter. Each one intended to 
acquire "a sheep and a cow" — and the esteem ac- 
corded to the possessor of fertile acres. In selecting 
homes in a western State the first consideration was 
one of average rainfall, average temperature, prob- 
able average yields per acre. These matters of 
their material life being to their satisfaction it was 
their intention to reproduce such institutions and 
social customs as they had left behind. No Greek 
colonists ever guarded more carefully and devotedly 
the coals taken from the home altars than did these 
New England colonists cherish the species of relig- 
ion and government in which they had been bred. 
So far from chafing under the thrall of precedent 
or the grip of convention they only desired to render 
more stable, more distinctly static, the beliefs and 
habits inherited from their fathers. They were in 
no sense radicals; they were hardly even liberals, 
and they habitualy accorded scant hospitality to any 
form of radicalism that appeared among them. A 
marked example of their natural lack of sympathy 
with new and unpopular reforms was furnished in 
the mobbing of the members of the Ohio State Anti- 
Slavery Convention who came to Granville to hold 
their anniversary in 1836. We are assured however 
by one historian that an immediate reaction fol- 
lowed this outbreak and the citizens were filled with 
shame that such violence should be done in their 



48 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

midst. On the very evening of the day when the 
mob broke loose, an abolitionist meeting was held 
in the stone school-house in the Welsh Hills and it 
was unmolested. "In fact, the abolition party 
received great accessions as the result of that day's 
work, and soon Granville became a well-known sta- 
tion on the Underground Railroad." 

It should also be pointed out to their credit that 
a temperance society was formed in their midst 
as early as 1828; the first one, it is believed, west of 
the Alleghanies. And from that time on, intemper- 
ance there found determined enemies even as the 
hunted slave, after 1836, found friends. The Gran- 
ville people, with all their conservatism, thus showed 
themselves in a measure capable of camping with 
the vanguard of social progress. 

The church, even though early broken up into 
four or five sects, was their dearest institution. The 
pastor, as the official representative of the church, 
was the great man whose teaching directed the 
thinking and ruled the conduct of his flock. Doc- 
trinal theology laid a heavy hand on them. This 
earthly life meant to them an experience of provi- 
dences, — of duty and toil, of punishments and 
rewards, to be followed finally by other-world 
recompense to those who had "kept the faith." 

Yet it must be recognized that their loyal submis- 
siveness to the church and its authorized leaders 
gave a certain coherence and stability to their 
standards of right conduct as well as right 
belief, and served for decades to keep the 
little community unspotted from an encroaching 
world. 



THE PIONEER MOTIVE 49 

Next to the church their most cherished institu- 
tion was the school; for, it hardly need be said, the 
Granville pioneers were in hearty accord with the 
uncompromising position taken by the Ordinance 
of '87, and later by the first Constitution of the 
State, that since knov/ledge is one of the three 
elements "necessary to good government and the 
happiness of mankind, schools and the means of 
education shall forever be encouraged." Students 
of Ohio's early history will recall the scandals con- 
nected with her school-lands, the struggles to 
secure a system of common schools, to recover and 
properly sell the lands originally designed to support 
such a system. It is to the enduring honor of early 
Granville that her citizens went ahead with arrange- 
ments for the establishment and maintenance of 
schools; they could not afford to wait until 1824 
when a legislature was finally elected that was 
willing to address itself to the duty of developing 
a free public-school system. There were undoubted- 
ly not a few other places that acted thus independ- 
ently of the State; but Granville waited neither for 
example nor fellowship in the matter. The spirit in 
which that log school-house was built in the winter 
of 1805-6 governed the community for years and 
led not only to the establishment of the public school 
but to various private institutions for education. 

The "free electors" of Granville had an instinct 
for politics — politics in the better sense of the word. 
Elections, office-holding, the machinery of adminis- 
tration, possessed for these frontiersmen an 
attraction that was perhaps a natural reaction to 
an opportunity for the creation of a community 



50 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

government. They were young men in a young 
village and came to their municipal duties unhamp- 
ered by any past administration either good or bad. 
The state Constitution allowed a degree of county 
and town autonomy that was promptly exercised. 
Thus we learn from official records that 

"at an Election Legally warned and held at the School 
hous in Granville on the 6th day of April in the year AD 
1807 for the pui-pos of chosing townships offisers the Number 
required in Law having asembled the hous proceded to chose 
a Chairman and too judges of the Election 

Silas Winchell chosen chairman 

l^^i!^^^^"^^ 1 judges of the Election 

John Edwards j j & 

Elkanah Lennel 



Justin Hillyer 



> clerks of the Election 



these being quallified according to Law the hous proseded 
to Ballot for one township Clerk three trustees two overseers 
of the poor two fenceviewers two apreisers of houses one of 
wich to serve as a Listor four supervisors of highways two 
constables and one township treasurer" 

Seventeen names are given as the officers duly 
elected "by a clear majority," and the list is followed 
by the note: 

"on Monday April the 13th two of the gentlemen trustees 
Mess Isriel Wells and Silas Winchell met at the inn hous of 
Deac Timmothy Rose and took a surity of Joseph Linnel 
faithfully proformance in the offis of a Constable in the 
following word and forme viz" 

Then follows a record of the note signed and 
witnessed. 



THE PIONEER MOTIVE 51 

This narrative deals with one township of the 
county which was erected out of Fairfield County 
in 1808, but a study of the Licking County settlers 
as a whole discloses the fact that the Granville 
colonists from Massachusetts were in many ways 
matched in nature and character by their nearest 
neighbors, the Welsh from Caermarthenshire, and 
the emigrants from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsyl- 
vania, who, coming a few years later, settled in a 
district a few miles southward and gave the names 
Etna and Klrkersville to their settlement centers. 
Deacon Theophilus Rees, the patriarch of the little 
Welsh Hills colony, was quite the peer of the 
worthiest deacons who came from the Berkshires. 
We are assured by Isaac Smucker that "Rees was 
a gentleman and a scholar, a man of intelligence 
and integrity and great usefulness to his country- 
men and to the church." Thomas Phillips, lifelong 
comrade and friend of Theophilus Rees, was also 
"a well-educated gentleman of large experience and 
extensive information and reading." 

And those Welsh Hills produced one man by the 
side of whom Granville had none to place. Indeed, 
the land over, in any time, has few enough like 
Samuel White (1812-1844) grandson of Thomas 
Phillips. Smucker, as historian of the Welsh Hills, 
gives us a character-sketch of White which ought 
to be passed on and then on. Smucker says: 

White was ambitious in the matter of obtaining an educa- 
tion and entered the Granville College as the first student 
on the list on the first day of the first term of said college. 
. . . .He was fearless, independent, outspoken, frank, honest, 
never uttering opinions he did not believe, and always gave 



52 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

expression to thoughts he entertained, without fear, favor or 
affection. In the famous crusades of his times against 
Slavery and Intemperance, he was always in the front ranks, 
playing the part of Richard the Lion-hearted and playing it 
well. He asserted the right of free discussion — indeed he 
became the acknowledged champion of the freedom of the 
Press and Speech and more than once braved infuriated 
brutal mobs who tyrannically denied the liberty of speech. 
Sam White never shrank from the open avowel of his senti- 
ments under any amount of popular odium, and therein 
he attained in those heroic times to the highest point of 
independent manhood. 

Smucker adds that he and White held opposmg 
political opinions, but were in harmony on the 
question of the right of free discussion. "I was not 
in political harmony with him and sometimes not 
on terms of friendly personal relations; but he had 
a noble nature and was therefore placable, forgiving, 
generous, magnanimous." In these words we find 
evidence of Isaac Smucker's own nobility of charac- 
ter. 

In 1844 White received the nomination of the 
Whig party for Congress in the district composed 
of Knox, Licking, and Franklin Counties. He died 
from overwork in that campaign, at the age of 
thirty-two. And the world had need of him. 

It can hardly be questioned that in colonial times 
Granville had a certain feeling of superiority over 
other villages and towns of the county. With more 
hair shirts on its submissive back, more unboiled 
peas in its pilgrim shoes, than other communities 
either desired or tolerated, this sense of greater 
excellence was only natural. The need for neighbor- 
liness, the disposition to friendhness induced by 



THE PIONEER MOTIVE 53 

wilderness circumstances, must have been all that 
saved the New England settlement from the charge 
of phariseeism. But the surrounding settlers left 
the little hill-encircled town to its zeal for Sabbath- 
keeping, its emphasis on education, its peculiar 
notions as to moral conduct, without reproach or 
envy. This was a time to build, each community in 
its own way. 



PART II. 



TALLOW CANDLE PERIOD 



CHAPTER VII. 

CENTERVILLE STREET 

No lovelier spot Ohio knows 
Than where the restful Racoon flows. 
Where country highways strolling down 
In friendship meet at Granville town; 

Where stately hills, elate though dumb. 
From out the fields of plenty come 
And, tree-crowned 'neath celestial blue. 
Hold their eternal rendezvous. 

— O. C. HOOPER, 1879, 

Denison University. 

The whole pioneer time in Ohio may be conven- 
iently divided into a Wild Turkey period and a 
Tallow Candle period. It is not implied that any 
sharp line divides these two periods; they naturally 
overlapped. The last of the turkeys were killed 
probably in the years 1850 to 1855; and they must 
have been scarce after 1840. The tallow candle 
began early to compete with the primitive torch 
and the glowing log-fire for the honor of lighting 

54 



CENTERVILLE STREET 55 

the backwoods cabin. There were enough candles 
in Granville in 1840 to enable the citizens to have 
an illumination in honor of the election of the Whig 
candidate for the presidency. "Candles in great 
profusion were prepared, and when darkness came 
all were lighted up. Almost every window on Broad 
Street was ablaze, some with a light glowing at 
every pane of glass." The turkey and the candle 
serve fairly well to indicate the early and the late 
colonial times. With the passing of the candle and 
the coming of the kerosene lamp modern life was 
fairly introduced. As my own memory runs back 
to a prekerosene time I am able to describe at first- 
hand some phases of Granville township life that 
were essentially pioneer. 

The roads radiating from the town were, as a 
rule, named from the more or less distant towns to 
which they ran. Thus we had the Lancaster road, 
the Columbus road, the Worthington road, the Mt. 
Vernon road and the Newark road. Along these 
roads substantial and prosperous farm-houses had 
replaced the original log cabins; although in the 
period now considered, the sixth decade of the nine- 
teenth century, many cabins could yet be found on 
by-roads. Most of these farm-houses were two- 
storied frame structures, with occasionally one of 
brick, for brickmaking was one of the first industries 
of the township. The houses were amply supple- 
mented with large barns, sheds, and other buildings 
required on a well-to-do farm. Vegetable gardens 
and miscellaneous fruit-trees — apples, pears, quin- 
ces, cherries, and plums, — flanked the immediate 
yard and often a regular orchard was to be seen. 



56 WILD TURICEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

The modem country-home has backed away from 
the road, but those first Ohio farm-houses, forget- 
ful of their ample acres, came pathetically out near 
the road as if looking for companionship. A formal 
front yard expressed the prevailing fashion in land- 
scape architecture; this yard was more satisfactory 
If a retaining-wall could be worked in somewhere, 
while a piece of iron fence established the owner's 
claim to urban distinction. 

If I speak particularly of one of these roads and 
of one homestead on it, it is not that others were not 
equally rich in features inviting description; it is 
only that I knew that road and that home best, and 
can therefore speak at first-hand. A description 
of mid-nineteenth century life on one of those Gran- 
ville farms applies generically to life on the others — 
allowance being made for such variations as give 
individuality and character to any home and its 
owners. 

The Newark road, for the first two miles out of 
Granville, was early named Centerville Street. It 
had one advantage — or disadvantage — over other 
thoroughfares in being the road to the county-seat 
and was consequently more traveled than any of the 
others. Centerville Street runs slightly north of 
west and south of east, parallel to the general direc- 
tion of Raccoon Creek, traversing a level, fertile 
tract of land which is bounded on the north by the 
crescent of the Welsh Hills and which extends to 
the creek on the south. The reach of this crescent 
is somewhat more than two miles, and from hills to 
creek the average distance is a little less than one 
mile. A few gracefully molded, unobtrusive spurs 



CENTERVILLB STREET 57 

like Alligator Hill extend far enough into the plain 
to give variety to the Welsh Hills range — on its 
south side, at least. The plain must have been 
early cleared for farming both because of its level 
nature and its rich soil; yet in 1860 many scattered 
trees as well as wood-lots of varying size remained, 
while the higher slopes and tops of the hills had 
hardly been touched by the axeman. 

My home was at the western end of Centerville, 
only a few hundred feet from the left bank of 
Clear Run; and my earliest associations were with 
Centerville rather than with the town of Granville 
itself. Our nearest neighbor, Deacon Wright, lived 
across the road in a large brick house; his front 
yard with a high retaining-wall on one side and an 
Iron fence set into dressed stone was, in the eyes 
of the little children belonging to the small quaint 
house opposite, a place of such sanctity that there 
was no danger of its ever being entered voluntarily 
by them. As if to ward off any approach to the 
iron fence, hitching posts had been placed some six 
feet from the fence and connected by rails to which 
no one ever hitched. Indeed, I was filled with awe 
if I ever had to pass along the walk, made of brick 
and bordered with evergreens, which led to the side 
door. One addition after another gave to the build- 
ing the effect of trailing away to a distant rear, and 
it was rendered especially mysterious by having 
what must have been a basement cellar with an 
outside door which seemed, like the hitching-posts, 
to serve no purpose. I know now that the basement 
of that house was a station on the Underground 
Railroad. I can remember more than one time 



58 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

when father entered our house and told mother in 
low tones that "another lot had come." The poor 
fugitives were concealed and fed and after dark 
were carried northward to the next station. But 
it was not a matter to be explained to little children. 
I here make honorable mention of that station- 
master and his wife. 

Further down the road on our side — the north 
side — was another Wright, the "Squire," — "Square" 
Wright we children had it — living in a stately 
old home surrounded by maple-trees. Across 
the way from him was the Wynkoop place where 
front-yard proprieties were quite set at naught; for 
the house — a little white cottage — stood far back 
from the road obviously to make room for the flow- 
ers which Mrs. Wynkoop cultivated with great suc- 
cess. The good lady had a long walk leading from 
her front door to nowhere ; for it stopped among the 
flowers and was only intended to give the owner 
access to her beds of blooming plants. How I 
wanted to see those flowers "near to;" but I never 
had the courage to go up the drive and ask permis- 
sion. The Haskell place next to the Wynkoops had 
one advantage all its own, namely: a lane that 
afforded us passageway at the side of the fields, 
down to a bank where a wild cherry-tree grew, past 
another field and then we were at the edge of the 
dear old Raccoon. Whether for wading or fishing 
or merely hunting clam-shells and polished pebbles, 
that creek drew me as if it were a magnet and I a 
tiny bit of iron ; and the Haskell lane was one of the 
several easy ways to reach it. On down the road 
were other farms and other old families; the Ayls- 



CENTERVILLE STREET 59 

worth place, Deacon Rose's place, the Bancrofts, 
and still further eastward the Robinson farm with 
its attractive substantial home built of bricks burnt 
in one of the near-by fields ; and next to it the Mun- 
son farm, the most famous one in Granville history; 
for here those Jones and Cunningham cabins were 
built near the springs, and here the two companies 
of colonists united for the last bit of their journey. 
The Munson farm-house in 1860 was another typical 
well-to-do place surrounded by fertile fields which 
extended from the hills to the creek. Below it, that 
is, eastward, were two or three more farms and the 
limit of Center ville was reached. The road unwill- 
ing to turn to the south climbed up one hill and 
down and then another, and so reached the "Dug- 
way," an excavation made in the side of the hill to 
avoid fording the creek. A trip to Newark 
was regarded by me as an event and the 
passage of the Dugway was the exciting feature of 
the trip — no matter what the wonders of Newark 
might be. For the road at the Dugway point was 
a single track without passing-room and it made a 
sharp curve so that an approaching team could not 
be seen until quite near. On one side, some feet 
below, was the creek; on the other, the steep rocky 
face exposed by cutting. Supposing we should 
meet anyone exactly at the worst place. Supposing ! 
but somehow we never did. Those Dugway sensa- 
tions have returned to me once since in my life: 
when the diligence in which I was a passenger 
climbed to the Purka Pass above the Rhone Glacier. 
A narrow road bounding the Robinson farm struck 
off northward and led into the heart of the Welsh 



60 WILD TURICEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

Hills district. It was a most inviting byway, woods- 
bordered, winding about and bringing its travelers 
into an unfamiliar region ; for the Welsh Hills coun- 
try was just beyond walking distance for small feet 
and we knew only its southern border. Besides 
this Hills road, two others branched from Center- 
ville but on the southern side; one to Clouse's mill 
at the head of the Granville "feeder" ; the other was 
the Cherry Valley road which we took when we 
went to the County fair at the "Old Fort." The 
mill-road was so near that the dam built across 
the Raccoon to supply water to the canal feeder 
was one of our various fishing haunts — esteemed 
dangerous by our elders, for some grown-up always 
happened to go along when we made our Saturday 
afternoon trips. 

Of the few spurs that broke the regularity of the 
Welsh Hills range one, nearly north of Squire 
Wright's place and about three-eighths of a mile 
from the road, was known as "Alligator Hill." We 
could easily see this bluff from our house because 
no considerable clump of trees or high land shut 
off the view. My very first notion about the alligator 
was of a living, crawling beast that might appear 
any day in our back yard. But as soon as I could 
walk the distance I was taken across the fields and 
up the hill to see the wonderful thing. There it 
sprawled, hummocky and grass-grown and did not 
move leg or tail. That couldn't hurt anybody. Had 
I known that some archaeologists would pronounce 
it an opossum and others declare that it closely 
resembles a lizard my first conception of the crea- 
ture might have contained less of the element of 



CENTERVILLE STREET 61 

fear — assuming tliat anyone had kindly told me the 
difference between an alligator and an opossum 
or an alligator and a lizard. The bluff where 
this mound is located had been cleared of 
trees and was in pasture. I never saw it as plowed 
ground. The "alligator" was a curiosity in the 
countryside, though probably no one realized the 
archaeological importance of saving it from plow 
and harrow. Henry Howe, in his Recollections of 
Ohio, says that this animal figure is two hundred 
and five feet in extreme length; greatest breadth of 
body, twenty feet; length of legs, twenty-five feet; 
average height, four feet. It is clear, therefore, 
that with so slight a thickness in comparison with 
its other dimensions a few years of plowing and 
harrowing would suffice to obliterate all animal- 
like outlines. 

As the alligator bluff is some one hundred and 
fifty or sixty feet above the plain and commands an 
unobstructed view to the southeast of at least eight 
miles, beacon-lights or other signals could easily 
have been seen at the mound-builders' works in 
Cherry Valley if there had ever been occasion to 
signal to the "Old Fort." The profusion of mounds 
and other artificial earth-forms in that part of Ohio, 
and especially in the little Centerville plain and the 
neighboring Cherry Valley, is convincing evidence 
that Ohio had once been occupied by a people very 
different from the Indian tribes which the white 
race found there. Whence had the Mound-Builder 
come? When and why did he go? Was it an- 
other case of invasion, conquest and migration? 

In many lands there are more commandingly 



62 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

beautiful scenes, wilder and grander views; yet one 
will search far to find any valley that surpassed in 
winning loveliness that of the Raccoon in 1850- 
1860 as viewed from one of those southern spurs 
of the Welsh Hills or, best of all, looking southeast 
from the top of the hill just east of Granville. The 
course of the creek was readily traced by the im- 
mense sycamores that everywhere fringed its banks ; 
the sycamore had too much individuality to allow 
its being confused with other trees. The rather 
low hills and gentle hollows between presented a 
series of most graceful curved surfaces unmarred by 
cuts or gradings. Across the creek on the southern 
horizon the sky met the earth on a range of hills of 
still less height, wood-covered, tinted in greens and 
browns and horizon-blues; — the pictures in my 
memory seem to be mostly summer and autumn 
ones. Often the softest shimmering mist hung 
over the creek and out of its blue-grey would come 
the mournful notes of a wild dove. The memory 
of the cherishing mother Nature that dwelt among 
those wooded hills and by the running waters is 
such that I know no other place where I would 
rather I had been turned loose to live and grow. 
Through the loveliness of that valley I believed the 
wide world was lovely, and in its shelter I was pre- 
pared to regard the whole earth as home and all 
the dwellers in the earth as my kinsfolk. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

AN OCTAGON OF EDUCATION 

To remain ignorant is to remain a slave. 

—J. A. WAYLAND. 

The heart of Centerville was the school-house 
situated about midway in the two-mile plain. 
Built of native freestone, octagonal in form and 
roofed with a low-spreading octagonal pyramid of 
shingle-work which was capped with a dressed 
stone of like shape, this school-house was unique 
for its day or indeed for any day. It appears from 
the records of the industries of Granville township 
that in 1823 one John Jones built a woolen factory 
"near the stone school-house on the Welsh Hills." 
There was, then, at an early date at least one other 
stone building put up for school purposes and be- 
longing to the Welsh settlement. It may be sur- 
mised that to Welshmen from Caermarthenshire, 
with memories of buildings at home, stone seemed 
the only appropriate material for a school-house, 
and that they therefore refused to use logs or planks 
or even brick. The Centerville school-house may 
well have been built through the Welsh Hills 
example and influence. 

This building stood back from the road and the 
shade trees of the yard were principally poplars, 
large ones. One side of the octagon contained the 
front door, opposite which was the teacher's desk 

63 



64 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

with a small blackboard for background. On the 
other six sides were desks, high and wide and 
immovable, with long wooden benches. Seats for 
the younger scholars were provided just in front 
of the big desks. These seats were narrow, unpar- 
titioned, and built as part of the desks. Thus the 
little folks had to sit there v,ithout desks of their 
own, without arm-supports or the least provision 
for storing away their few belongings. What was 
worse, the older scholars by reaching over could 
tweak the ears or poll the hair of the helpless little 
victims in front. I am obliged to record that advan- 
tage was sometimes taken of this situation. I was 
one of those who sat below in silent dread of the 
dangers that threatened above. A queer upright 
stove occupied the centre of the room and bitumin- 
ous coal was burnt, although wood must have been 
quite as cheap. 

To this school I was sent one happy day when I 
was just seven years old. As I trotted down the 
road by the side of the teacher, carrying my dinner 
in a tiny but gaily-painted wooden pail, my heart 
beat high with a sense that this was an adventure 
of moment — as indeed it was. I had learned most 
of my letters from certain words that stood out in 
relief on our sitting-room stove, the company name 
of the makers of that stove; and after that, mother 
had taught me to read — as an exigency measure: 
she had no time to read to me. But now I was to 
go to work systematically, in a school, and I was 
quite willing to begin at the beginning of the spell- 
ing-book with "a-b ab, e-b eb, i-b ib, o-b ob, u-b 
ub." That school's meagemess of equipment did 



AN OCTAGON OP EDUCATION 65 

not impress me then. In my eyes any equipment 
at all was wonderful. Lumps of natural chalk were 
used instead of modern crayon. There were no 
wall-maps and no places for any. The pupils had 
slates of varying sizes made of real slate set in 
wooden frames, with gritty pencils, also made of 
slate. We cherished our few school-books because 
we owned them, and that ownership often meant a 
long series of chore-doing. Careful mothers covered 
the books with cloth — a piece of new calico usually; 
and this protection was supplemented with paper 
thumb-covers which we wore when we could 
remember to do so. 

No rare or especially valuable book has ever 
given me the peculiar happiness that I felt one well- 
remembered morning when I woke to find a Mc- 
Guffey's First Reader on the pillow by my head. 
My father was rather fond of surprises of that 
sort. It was a tiny, homely book — six inches long 
and less than four inches wide — and promptly be- 
came my most cherished possession, whether at 
home or on that exposed front seat down at the 
school-house. Of all the treasures in that treasure- 
book of literature the one that I prized most was the 
delectable story of Mr. Post and Mary which begins : 

One cold night, after old Mr. Post had gone to bed, he 
heard a noise at the door. So he got up and went out. And 
what do you think he found? A dog? No; A goat? No; he 
found a little babe on the steps. 

This story I read again and again. My fancy 
never wearied of reveling in the happiness of the 
old man and the little girl. To me they were real 



G6 WILD TURIvEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

people and might well have lived down the lane near 
us. 

Another book, even more highly valued, was my 
geography — Smith's Primary Geography, 1855. It 
also was a small book, in great contrast with mod- 
ern school-geography text-books. Its pictures — 
curious old woodcuts of a prephotographic age — 
took me into far countries, and some of the text 
even farther away ; for from it I learned that 

"The Moon around the Earth doth run; 
The Earth and Moon around the Sun. 
The Earth moves on its centre, too. 
As wheels and tops and pulleys do; 
W^ater and land make up the whole. 
From east to west, from Pole to Pole." 

The formulas of celestial mechanics have never 
been able to banish or even blur my childish vision 
of the moon running breathlessly around the earth. 
This same text-book contained some statements of 
marked value today in showing how far thought has 
become freed and knowledge diffused since 1855. 
Thus in one set of questions and answers in Smith 
we had: 

Q. When was the world created? 
A. Nearly six thousand years ago. 

The author evidently felt it a duty to be more exact, 
for in a small-type note he adds : 

the creation of the world (reckoning up to A. D. 1854) took 
place 5858 years ago. 

Yet such comforting certainties had met their undo- 
ing a quarter of a century before in Lyell's Principles 



AN OCTAGON OP EDUCATION 67 

of Geology (1830). Lyell was either unknown or 
his argument rejected by those who were writing 
our elementary geography books only four years 
before the publication of the Origin of Species. 

My own particular copies of those two books, 
McGuffey's Eclectic First Reader and Smith's Pri- 
mary Geography, have long since disappeared with 
all other things material connected with my Cehter- 
ville school-days; but it is a satisfaction to know 
that other copies of them are in the safe-keeping of 
the Library of Congress. 

Our Centerville school was, of course, ungraded; 
that is, it provided for all grades. But if the freshmen 
began with "a-b ab" no teacher could be expected 
to show a senior class of any great advancement. 
However, in Centerville, the degree of advancement 
reached in one's studies was unimportant, for within 
two miles were various other schools where one 
might study if he were so minded. The great service 
was to provide an open door out of the bondage of 
ignorance. 

Two gigantic black walnut trees, interrupting 
the undecided foot-path that straggled past the sal- 
ients of rail fences, stood by the Centerville wayside 
in those early days. One was near Mr. Haskell's 
house ; the other, a short distance west of the school- 
house. Their vast trunks branched into wide- 
spreading symmetrical tops which shaded the road 
for many yards around. Their great horizontal 
reach of limb indicated that they had never suffered 
from forest crowding. For some reason they must 
have been spared when the first clearings were 
made and their fellow-trees laid low. Wagoners 



68 WILD TURIOHYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

rested their horses in these shades and each tree 
afforded a genuine oasis for children pattering along 
barefooted through the dust to school. Incidentally 
their bountiful crop of nuts was a large item in their 
autumn hospitality. Were these two trees destroyed 
by storms, or were vandal axes made to hurt them 
to death with the notion that in their fall and re- 
moval the street would be "improved"? They are 
gone, and the quaint, octagonal school-house is 
gone, too ; though it was well worth preserving as a 
museum for colonial articles of the neighborhood. 
In 1860 most of the attics and cellars on Center- 
ville Street probably contained historical treasures 
that could tell of the pioneer days. 

The small pronoun of partnership, we, has already 
been used in this narrative and will be used again to 
denote a group of little folks hereditarily disposed, 
even in their tenderest years, to engage in any ex- 
ploring and primitive living that came to hand. It 
seems necessary to explain who "we" were. Of the 
family of children living in the house on the bluff 
opposite Deacon Wright's place in 1860 I was the 
eldest and naturally the leader. Next to me was 
Anna, the unselfish obliging one, ready to take any 
role in the plays and go to the limit of her energy 
in our carryings-on. Following her came Orlena, 
earnest and sympathetic, a genuine pal in devising 
and executing schemes. I can see her now, her 
noble Winchell head and sturdy little figure, as she 
bends to some cooperative task of ours such as dam- 
ming the tiny run which was trying to make its 
way through water-cresses and past small engineers 
to Clear Run. Last of the girls was Mariquita, the 



AN OCTAGON OF EDUCATION 69 

"little Mary;" a most winning child, full of daring 
and needing to be constantly watched lest she crawl 
under the big gate and start off on expeditions of her 
own. She was fortunate in being the youngest girl 
as that placed her next to Willard, who was twenty- 
two months her junior, and thus they two became 
special chums. Willard was a silent, gentle child 
who at first regarded the performances of his sisters 
with much quiet wonder, but soon entered actively 
into every plan as if he were as old as any any of us. 
Besides his silence and gentleness one other charac- 
teristic marked him from his very earliest years: he 
seemed not to know what physical fear is. It might 
be a drove of steers coming down the road, or just 
a place in the stream where the water swirled over 
slippery stones rather too strongly for his little legs 
— he wasn't afraid; he met the danger, whatever it 
was, with the same intrepid daring with which, in 
his frail and hastily-built boat, he ran the Nizina 
Canyon, Alaska, 1891. Last to join us and one 
especially welcomed was Stanley, a golden-haired 
lad, in features and bearing very like Orlena, the 
sister whom he never saw. But by the time Stanley 
was old enough to be boosted over a rail fence or to 
crawl through a board one our father had moved 
his family to a distant part of the county, and thus 
the youngest never got his rightful share of the 
Centerville heritage. The sequel has shown, how- 
ever, that the spell of his native valley was on him 
in no less degree than on the rest of us. 

Of this group of six two are gone. Orlena was 
only nine years old when attacked by a swift- work- 
ing and fatal brain disease — perhaps meningitis. In 



70 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

the twilight of that June day in 1864 when we had 
looked for the last time on her dear face, the 
sorrowing parents, sitting by themselves and not 
knowing that they were accidently overheard, said 
to each other: "We have lost the choicest one of the 
bunch." "Yes, we have." I doubt not that they 
were right. To this hour I grieve for Orlena as for 
one who has been needed by her family and by the 
world. 

The story of my brother Willard's life has been 
elsewhere told.* It is not necessary, therefore, 
here to describe how, in due time, he went far afield 
and brought honor to his native State as a geologist. 
While yet in the prime of life his strong skilled hands 
grew frail and lost their hold on hammer and pen, 
and he, too, vanished into the deep shadows which 
everywhere border the Long Trail. 

"Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, 
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair, 
And what may quiet us in a death so noble." 

In this book Orlena and Willard are two happy 
little children, keen-eyed and sturdy, roaming to- 
gether over the fields and through the woods of their 
pioneer ancestors. 

* Alfred H. Brooks: Bulletin of the Geological Society of 
America, 1917. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE WOLCOTT HOMESTEAD 

Plow deep while sluggards sleep, and you shall 
have corn to sell and to keep. 

—POOR RICHARD. 

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. 

— Mother-Lore. 

Sandisfield, Massachusetts, located near Granville 
in the Berkshires, had furnished pioneers for Ohio's 
first settlement more than half a dozen years before 
the Granville colony was organized. Among the 
Sandisfield emigrants who went early to Marietta 
were two brothers, Horace and Josiah Wolcott, 
descendants of Henry Wolcott of Somersetshire, 
England, who came to America in 1630 and settled 
at Windsor, Connecticut. It was like a Wolcott to 
push on to the frontier — and there was little dirt 
to cover the corn in Sandisfield. Horace, a son of 
Horace, was born in the Marietta home by the Ohio 
in 1799. He was thus perhaps even more of a 
pioneer, though less of a traveler, than Rebecca 
Winchell who in her babyhood had the pleasure of 
taking the seven hundred-mile ride in her mother's 
arms. At any rate he grew up knowing western 
life under its most primitive conditions. Going as 
a surveyor into the wilderness of Franklin, a county 
adjoining Licking on the west, young Wolcott con- 
tinued as far eastward as Granville in the year 1822 
or 1823. He could not have felt like an entire 

71 



72 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

stranger there, as his father had visited the settle- 
ment as early as 1811 and must have told the boy 
about old Massachusetts friends whom he found In 
the new Granville. 

Horace Wolcott, now about twenty-four years old, 
met Rebecca Winchell and presently decided that 
Granville was the place where he wanted to make 
his home ; and there his home was, for the rest of his 
life. He operated the Clear Run grist-mill for 
some twenty years when he sold it to Norton Case; 
but he was primarily and essentially a farmer; the 
farm that he owned and on which he lived was a 
part of the original Winchell tract of 1805. It was 
the first farm on the right-hand side coming east- 
ward out of Granville. Only fifty or sixty acres it 
yet offered as varied a topography as any farm that 
could have been found in Licking County or, prob- 
ably, in the State. It included: the top and eastern 
and southern slopes of the relatively high hill which 
limits the town on the east; a considerable reach of 
low pasture-land through which Clear Run took its 
way; a broad level terrace or upper bottom; and the 
"bottom" proper which extended down to the creek. 
The steepest part of the hill had been left in woods 
made up chiefly of maples, beeches, elms, walnuts 
and butternuts. A rudely graded contour-road 
through this bit of woods gave the farm teams 
access to the cultivated fields "round the hill." 
Thus the lay of the land was such that much the 
larger part of the farm being 'round the hill was 
quite out of sight from the house. The natural 
fertility of the terrace had been increased by judi- 
cious farming and manuring, while the annual 



THE WOLCOTT HOMESTEAD 73 

overflow of the creek contributed greatly to the 
corn-producing powers of the rich black loam of 
the bottom. The farm was fenced, in part at least, 
with rails split from black walnut trees grown on 
the acres thus enclosed. 

The house belonging to this farm stood perhaps 
fifty feet from the Newark road, close to the spot 
where the original log cabin had been built. There 
was barely room for a driveway between the house 
and the orchard hillside, the entire garden being on 
the east side of the house. Its status as one of the 
first-class houses of the street was established by 
a conventional front yard with retaining walls and 
a picket fence. A tamarack-tree occupied the space 
on one side of the short flight of stone steps leading 
up to the front door while a gnarled old smoke-tree 
stood on the other side. A snowball bush was a 
further ornament of this yard, with peonies and one 
or two rose-bushes as the favored flowers. My 
sister Anna reminds me that "grass would not grow 
under that tamarack; the ground was covered with 
periwinkle {vinca minor) ; 'myrtle' we called it." A 
retaining wall separated this yard from the garden, 
and below the wall, in the garden, stood a mighty 
apple-tree. The bank and ground under the tree 
were carpeted with violets. Anna thinks "they 
were the common viola cucullata, though they were 
unusually large— as large as the pedata." I could 
believe that a cucullata might be trying to turn itself 
into a pedata in that garden. We children had no 
proper respect for those violets ; they never ranked, 
in our opinion, with the really wild flowers, nor did 
they receive any cultivation; they just grew there, 



74 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

like the myrtle under the tamarack. It was, conse- 
quently, one of our destructive amusements to 
hook two violets together and then pull on the stems 
to see who could get the head of the other's flower. 
Happily the violets were so abundant that we made 
no impression on the crop of any year. 

Our father, Charles Coleman Hayes, born in 
Franklin County and so a son of Ohio pioneers, was 
a tanner and operated the tannery which had been 
established by Spencer Wright in 1817 on the banks 
of Clear Run. Thus we were not, strictly speaking, 
farm children, although our place included several 
acres with a garden and fruit-trees. However, this 
merely meant that the little Hayes children enjoyed 
acquaintance with the mysteries of tanning as a 
kind of additional by-pleasure. There, immediately 
at hand, was grandfather's farm which served every 
purpose quite as if it were our own. I always felt 
myself to be more or less of a trespasser in the fields 
and woods that belonged to the Wrights or Mr. 
Aylsworth or Norton Case ; though no one ever told 
me to keep out and the suggestive barbed-wire fence 
was unknown. But grandfather's lands were mine 
to roam, to know intimately, and to regard at last 
as true Elysian Fields. 

Grandfather's house was a two-storied white- 
painted wooden structure, drawn out, like all such 
houses of the time, through porch, buttery, kitchens, 
and ending in an immense woodhouse where many 
cords of wood were stored to be sawed as needed. 
The most characteristic part of the house was the 
"back kitchen" which in the original plan of the 
building had been the only kitchen. It represented 



THE WOLCOTT HOMESTEAD 75 

the colonial idea of desirable cooking arrangements : 
a large fireplace with a wide hearth and beside it 
a cavernous brick oven. This oven, like the fire- 
place, fell into disuse about 1856; but I have heard 
mother describe the bakings — Saturday bakings — 
that were the order of the day in her girlhood. It 
seems that when that oven was once heated you 
had to make the most and best of it, filling it out 
with numbers of loaves of bread — different kinds of 
bread — rows of pies, cakes and whatever else was 
suitable for oven-cooking. At this time a wide open 
porch separated the kitchen and its adjoining wood- 
house from the rest of the house. On winter 
mornings the mother had to go out of doors, 
practically, to reach the scene of breakfast prepara- 
tions ; and she must have passed many times during 
the day through that arctic porch. In the summer, 
however, the great porch was a pleasant place; the 
table was set there for meals and there the women 
did their spinning; while the "butt'ry," claiming one 
corner of the porch, was the scene of grandmother's 
cheese-making operations. 

One of the chief assets of this farm was the deep- 
seated never-failing spring at the foot of the hill and 
near the road — also not far from the kitchen door. 
It must have found quick appreciation in the eyes of 
Silas Winchell and his wife when the Winchell acres 
were selected and bought in 1805. That spring 
figures among my earhest recollections; in the 
ISSO's it was sheltered by an ample brick spring- 
house around which grew various trees, mostly 
poplars. Stones had been placed so as to form a 
brim for the water which welled up from a sandy 



76 WILD TURICEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

bottom and flowed leisurely out over a spread of 
pebbles and found exit from the spring-house on the 
side toward the road. In all weathers except the 
coldest, grandmother set her crocks of milk and 
cream in this shallow running water, and often the 
churning was done in the spring-house or in the 
shade just outside the door. The butter-jar kept 
company with the crocks of milk. It always seemed 
as if the richness and sweetness of that hard yellow 
butter was due to the running spring-water; though 
there may have been something in grandmother's 
skill — also in grandfather's cows. 

On the steep hillside above the spring, reaching 
from the public road to the pasture-fields on the 
south, was the orchard. A few of the trees were 
of great size and must have been set out in the early 
years of the colony; the others were in their prime 
when I first knew them. Spraying was unknown 
in those days; indeed, it seemed not to be needed; 
but the trees were regularly and carefully trimmed. 
A small flock of merino sheep helped in the care of 
this orchard, for they were given the run of it when- 
ever the grass showed signs of reaching mowing- 
length. Ragweeds tried to get a foothold, but either 
the sheep or the thrifty grass headed them off. It 
is a mystery now how grandfather ever secured such 
a variety of choice apples. Did the grafts come 
from the Bowling Green nursery, or the Cunning- 
ham orchard, or Phineas Ford's place on Ramp 
Creek? There were Red Vandevers, Gate-apples, 
Russets, Rambos, Pippins, Greenings, and Bellflow- 
ers; and each kind, considered by itself, seemed the 
best. Just at the top of the steepest part of the hill 



THE WOLCOTT HOMESTEAD 77 

grew two or three vigorous young trees which bore 
what we called Wine-apples. These apples were of 
enormous size and beautifully splashed with vivid 
red; the texture and flavor quite matched the 
appearance of the apple. But they were an autumn 
apple and not "good keepers." A Wine-apple vrould 
fall, bound down the hill and across the narrow 
driveway and hit the house with a challenging thud. 
Then grandmother in a tone of resignation would 
say, "Well, Elly, go get it; I guess we'll have to make 
a pie, now." Yet as "eating-apples" they were 
much too fine to be used for mere pies. 

The professor of horticulture, Ohio State Univer- 
sity, has kindly furnished me with a list of nine 
varieties of apples that are now most extensively 
grown in Ohio, with a rating of their comparative 
merits. I do not find in the list a single variety tha,t 
the Wolcott orchard contained in 1855; which must 
mean, so far as one orchard's evidence shows, that 
the old apples are gone with those old orchards. 
Are the new ones really superior to the old? 

Although apples were the main fruit-crop there 
were some grapes. A mighty Catawba vine grew 
on one side of the house and an Isabella on the 
other. The modern favorites had not then been 
originated. Quince-trees flourished with no need of 
sprays, while the latest and best varieties of black- 
berries, strawberries, currants, and gooseberries 
found places in the ample garden east of the house. 
To this list should be added pears and cherries of 
which there was always an abundance. 

Besides being continually after apples people 
came to this farm for sweet potato plants, for seed 



78 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

corn and oats and seed potatoes; for rhubarb, — "pie- 
plant" it was called — for honey and asparagus. Yet 
the home table was never robbed nor was the family 
compelled to be content with inferior leavings while 
the best was parted with to buyers at the gate. 
Grandfather throve but not through hard bargain- 
ing. His reputation rested not merely on the fact 
that he was sure to have the best article that could 
be raised; he was absolutely fair in weights and 
measures as well as in quality — and the finest apples 
were quite likely to be at the bottom of the barrel. 
He was somewhat of a bee-specialist and diligently 
read his bee-keepers' journal. In 1852 Langstroth 
gave to the world his important invention: a hive 
with a movable frame; and soon after that a Lang- 
stroth beehive appeared on the orchard hillside, and 
a little later an Italian queen bee was housed there. 
If Horace Wolcott could have been advised, sixty 
years ago, of the condition of the cellar in my 
eastern home as that cellar stands today he would 
undoubtedly have wondered with deep concern 
whether all his other grandchildren were to live in 
like straitened circumstances. Not one barrel of 
apples or bushel of potatoes — to say nothing of the 
lack of barrels of pork and corned beef, of vinegar 
and cider. Little except coal and wood and canned 
fruit; and what do such trifles as canned fruit and 
jellies and grape-juice signify for food. That a 
motor-truck from Boston should stop at my gate 
twice a week on its delivery-rounds and bring me 
whatever I had chosen to order would only prove 
against me the scandalous fact of "living from hand 
to mouth." In 1860 paper-bag marketing was yet 



THE WOLCOTT HOMESTEAD 79 

to be dreamed of and devised. It would certainly 
have aroused grandfather's utmost disapproval if 
not his scorn. His own ample cellar was so stored 
with barrels and bins of farm-produce that one 
could barely pass from the stairway end of it to the 
other end by squeezing through narrow lanes 
formed by these barrels. The house was provi- 
sioned as if for a seige, though the only foe that 
ever invested this domestic fortress was the cold and 
snow of the unproductive months. 

The little brick smoke-house in the back orchard 
supplemented the cellar. Each autumn, after the 
hogs were butchered, the smoke-house rafters were 
hung thick with hams and shoulders and bacon 
strips; and when a "beef critter" was killed many 
pieces of jerked beef were crowded in among the 
hams. Every morning through the late fall and the 
winter grandfather went with a shovelful of coals 
and smoke-making materials and started a fire on 
the ash-strewn earthen floor. That windowless chim- 
neyless hut might have contained the shrine of Lars 
faniiliaris, so faithfully did the head of the house 
himself attend to the duty of building fragrant fires 
therein. But he was only providing for his family — 
as his father before him had done in shooting bears 
and wild turkeys. No Chicago packers will ever put 
on the market hams and bacon and dried beef with 
such a delicious flavor as belonged to those home- 
cured products that came out of the little old smoke- 
house. 

With the exception of tea, coffee, sugar, salt, and 
a few spices every item of food-stuff that the family 
needed was raised on the farm. For root-foods 



80 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

there were white potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, 
carrots, beets, and parsnips. Above ground, beans, 
peas, cabbages, tomatoes, lettuce, pumpkins, 
squashes, cucumbers, watermelons and muskmel- 
ons ; and to these must be added that array of fruits 
beginning with apples and ending with cherries. 
Finally the grains. Apples certainly had a rival in 
the Indian com to the growing of which the soil was 
so admirably adapted. Besides corn there was 
wheat, oats, rye, and buckwheat, — enough and more 
than enough for the family's needs. 

Grandfather Wolcott undoubtedly had a special 
aptitude for fruit-growing and gardening; he prob- 
ably did surpass his neighbors in some of the land- 
arts which are near sciences — grafting and pruning, 
for instance ; yet the thrift and success that marked 
his farming operations were, on the whole, fairly 
typical of the thrift on the majority of the farms 
in Granville township and in the entire county, for 
that matter, in 1850 — 1860. The most important 
economic feature of society at that time, so far as 
food was concerned, was the freedom from depen- 
dence on outside markets. And this went far 
toward maintaining the colonial quality of life. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE YEAR AROUND 

Come, let us anew 
Our journey pursue. 
Roll round with the year. 

New- Year's Hymn. 

The pioneer year, instead of dating from the first 
of January, really opened some six weeks later when 
the sap began to ascend in the sugar-maples. 
Those who were so fortunate as to possess a sugar- 
camp now brought out the wooden troughs, tapped 
the trees and inserted elder spiles which conducted 
the sap to the troughs placed at the bases of the 
trees. The sap was gathered and boiled in large 
kettles usually hung somewhere in the camp. It 
was cold and often wet work; but it will be, let us 
hope, many thousands of years yet before normal 
human beings cease to enjoy a wood fire out of 
doors. Primitive man built a fire in the open — and 
that explains all, or nearly all. The camp-fire, the 
dinner of cold mutton, bread and butter, and dough- 
nuts, eaten sitting on a log with one's wet shoes 
near the hot ashes, the "sugaring-off" nights when 
the neighbors came over — did the round year offer 
any activity more welcomed than that initial piece 
of work: sugar-making. Our farm had no real 
camp, only maple-trees scattered here and there 

81 



82 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

among the other trees. But we children knew how 
to manage so that the sweets of those few trees 
should not go wholly to waste. We cleaned away 
the leaves and earth from the large knobby roots 
just at the base of the tree in order to get a compar- 
atively level surface; then with some stubby old 
knife borrowed from the kitchen and a gimlet from 
the tool-chest we dug holes about an inch in diame- 
ter and half an inch deep in these exposed level 
roots. The hole was presently filled with sap; 
indeed, the sap was in a hurry; it began running 
before we were ready for it. Then you had to get 
down on your hands and knees and drink the sap. 
One swallow and the tiny cup was empty. It was 
delightfully exciting to run from tree to tree and 
secure the sweet draught before the cup overflowed. 
We had our favorite trees, because we discovered 
that the sap was much sweeter in some trees than 
in others. Whether we had to kneel down on dead 
leaves or plain bare ground, our feet and knees were 
sure to be damp and chilled, if not actually wet, 
when we went home from this sap-drinking. Small 
wonder that mother was usually called upon to rise 
in the middle of the night, bring the queer old 
camphor-bottle and rub some child whimpering with 
the "leg-ache." But the next morning we were all 
off again, across the fields to the trees, worried by 
nothing except the thought of the sap that had run 
to waste during the night. 

The snow had now disappeared except on some 
spots unreached by the sunshine. Every farmer was 
looking anxiously at his wheat-fields and presently 
getting ready to plow for corn. Before anyone 



THE YEAR AROUND 83 

realized it garden-making was at hand. Mother 
carefully saved seeds every summer and fall, and 
now she brought out her bag of seeds, each kind 
tied up and marked; for this was before the day of 
the seed catalogue and the success of the garden 
depended largely upon the saving of good seeds the 
season before. Grandfather regularly had a large 
hotbed and in it the sweet potato plants and early 
tomato plants were grown; but most seeds were, of 
course, planted directly in the ground. In the gar- 
den planted by father every row was straight and 
all the rows evenly spaced; not an onion or a beet 
dared step out of line during the entire season. 
Grandfather was much less particular; all the 
vegetables seemed to be having a luxuriantly jolly 
time on that sunny eastern slope below the house. 
I have since concluded that plants do not consider 
"toeing the mark" an essential of happiness or 
growth. 

In the spring everything came at once. Besides 
being the time to make garden it was also the time 
to make soap. The wood-ashes had been stored in 
a large wooden hopper, pyramid-shaped, vertex 
down. Soap-grease had also been saved during the 
year. The useful big kettle in the back yard was 
now rigged up and the soap-grease put on to cook. 
Water, many pailsful, had to be carried and poured 
onto the ashes. What finally trickled out at the 
bottom of the leach was strong lye. The lye was 
added to the soap-grease and after a proper amount 
of boiling and stirring the soap was done. The 
result was a dark-brown translucent jelly— soap 
indeed. A barrel of it, more or less, was stored 



84 WILD TURI^YS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

away in the cellar to be used for washing clothing 
and dishes and floors, though we had bars of coarse 
yellow soap, less strong than this home-made soap, 
for bathing purposes. Ivory soap and all its kind of 
light mild soaps were yet to be compounded. "Did 
you have good luck with your soap?" amounted to a 
fraternity password among the housewives of that 
period. 

The Clear Run bridge where the Newark road 
crossed the stream was probably of wood to begin 
with; but in my childhood it was a solidly built, 
single-arched stone bridge, only broad enough for 
a single track with no railing to protect the foot- 
passenger from going over the edge. On the upper 
side the water ran rapidly and whirled sharply as it 
turned to go beneath the bridge. This spot was 
never a favorite place for wading: the water would 
knock you down; also, because the water was so 
swift, it was useless for fishing. But below the 
bridge the stream widened out into a comparatively 
large and calm pool through the lower and shal- 
lower parts of which, people drove to water their 
horses or to go down the by-road that led to the 
sawmill and the creek ford. This crossing-place 
below the bridge was reached on either side by a 
track much lower than the road proper. The 
depth of the water in the pool depended on the 
freaks of the spring freshets. Sometimes we found 
that a good deep fishing-hole had beetn filled up and 
another dug out somewhere else. The neighbor- 
hood washed its buggies in the pool and grandfather 
also used it for washing the sheep just before 
shearing-time in the spring. The sheep were driven 



THE YEAR AROUND 85 

down the ford-road and though they tried to 
scramble up the bank or dash back toward home, 
with much pushing and heading-off they were got 
into the water. One or two of my uncles waded in 
above their knees and tumbled the poor sheep 
about, under the delusion that they were washing 
them. The water was cold and not even any soft 
soap was used. I, who excitedly watched this oper- 
ation from the bridge-edge above, was always glad 
when the scared and distressed creatures were 
allowed to go baclt into the "little meadow" by the 
barn and dry themselves in the sunshine; though 
even then I had my doubts about the efficacy of 
that scrubbing. If warm water and soft soap were 
needed to wash a little flannel petticoat why did not 
one need as much to wash a sheep's woolly coat? It 
now seems probable that the sheep-washing was a 
traditional ceremony. 

Perhaps the happiest day of the late spring was 
the one when mother finally decided that it was 
warm enough for us to take off our shoes and 
stockings. We had grown so tired of those woolen 
stockings, though they were thin and old and 
much darned, and the little shoes were old, too, 
with a winter's hard wear; and now our white 
tender feet were set free to take their first run of 
the season on the soft grass that grew around the 
well and reached over to the newly-made garden. 
Excepting on Sundays when we had to "fix up" to 
go to Sunday-school, or on an occasional errand to 
town or some journey away from home, we never 
saw those shoes and stockings until the September 
frosts and chestnut-burs made us glad to put them 



86 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

on again. And long before that time our feet were 
brown and tough. Gravel, tan-bark, and even 
wheat-stubble we trotted lightly over with indiffer- 
ence, although we never lost our fear of the Osage 
orange thorns. 

Grandfather's barn was much larger than his 
house and it had need to be to accommodate the 
hay and oats and wheat that came from the fields 
'round the hill. Extra help was employed on the 
farm at this one time: when the grain must be 
quickly harvested. But as for the threshing — that 
was done at any time during the year as need arose. 
Sometimes the sheaves of wheat were unbound 
and strewn evenly on the threshing-floor and one 
man threshed out the grain with a flail. This flail 
consisted of two stout dressed sticks, one long and 
one short, tied loosely together with a buckskin 
string. Grasping the end of the long piece with 
both hands the thresher skilfully whirled the short 
piece above his head and brought it down so that 
its whole length struck the grain at once with a 
dull thump. Wheat-heads seemed quite unable to 
resist such a thumping. There was evidently a 
knack in threshing with a flail, even as there is in 
mowing hay with a scythe or in milking a cow — 
with opportunity for degrees of expertness. 

At other times the two horses were brought in 
and walked around on the threshing-floor until the 
wheat lay on the floor underneath the straw. 
Grandfather certainly was an adept at divining a 
child's unspoken wish, for more than once he made 
a rude saddle with a blanket, perched me astride a 
horse and so I rode blissfully in this tranquil barn^ 



THE YEAR AROUND 87 

circus. The barn-equipment included at least one 
piece of real machinery: a fanning-mill run by one- 
man power like a grindstone. After the straw had 
been removed from the floor and the grain gathered 
up it was separated from the chaff in this fanning- 
mill. The next thing was to go over to the grist-mill 
and get the wheat ground; then we were likely to 
have for supper hot biscuits that had been in the 
sheaf high under the barn rafters that morning. 

The grist-mill, a few hundred yards from grand- 
father's barn, was the one which great-grandfather 
Winchell had built in 1816. It now had a carding- 
mill department ; and here some of the wool washed 
in Clear Run was carded. Before her marriage 
mother did a great deal of spinning. She never 
spun afterwards except now and then for pleasure 
and to show her wondering little girls how it was 
done; nor am I able to say where her yarn was 
made after it was carded; but she knitted — knitted 
incessantly when she was not doing other work. 
It was necessary, for "store stockings" had hardly 
found their way into common use, even if they 
could be bought at all. So mother made all the 
stockings for her family; she was so expert that she 
could knit a medium-sized stocking in one day if 
it were just an ordinary day and somebody helped a 
bit with the usual program, which was merely one 
of cooking three meals, washing dishes, making 
beds, sweeping floors, and attending to the needs 
of the little ones. I doubt whether she regarded 
knitting as work ; for I have often seen her knitting, 
gently rocking the baby in the cradle, and reading 
a book or paper at the same time. Besides stock- 



88 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

ings she knitted good warm mittens, usually of red 
or white yarn. 

Not only our stocldngs but our shoes, as a rule, 
were home-made. The house-to-house shoemaker 
came every fall with his kit and bench and was 
established in one corner of the tannery building 
where he worked until all of us, old and young, were 
new-shod for the winter. The shoes, compared 
with modern machine-made products, were ill- 
shaped homely foot-gear ; but they were made of the 
finest calfskin, and they served well to carry us 
through the slush and mud of a long winter. Our 
clothes were likewise home-made. Mother cut out 
our garments, as well as her own, and sewed them 
by hand; while the village tailoress, going from 
house to house, came when needed and made 
father's clothes. Our little dresses were of calico 
in the summer, with winter ones of linsey-woolsey, 
a coarse strong mixture of wool and linen. Our 
"every-day" undergarments were made of nankeen, 
— a mild form of the modern cotton khaki as regard- 
ed texture and color, though much lighter in weight. 
In the dressing of us mother made one concession 
to the prevailing views of elderly ladies: she insisted, 
or tried to insist, on sunbonnets. How we detested 
those sunbonnets! I was willing to start out with 
one, for it continually came handy to carry eggs or 
stones or chips in. The younger girls often suffered 
the ignominy of having their bonnets tied on in 
secure knots under their chins. One way to meet 
this trouble was to push the bonnet off so that it 
hung down one's back like an academic hood. It 
was also true that much chewing would weaken a 



THE YEAR AROUND 89 

sunbonnet-string. We wore our hair cut short and 
hair-ribbons were happily unknown in that day. 
Thus we went about in the summer and autumn 
months, always barefooted, usually bareheaded, 
much browned and somewhat freckled by the sun 
and wind, blithe in our fitness to wade streams, 
climb trees, and slide down haymows. 

For one or two days each year the men of the 
neighborhood dropped all other work and rounded 
themselves up under the direction of a road-super- 
visor to work on the roads; in this way meeting 
their road taxes. They brought horses and wagons, 
plows, scrapers, and shovels. The ground beside 
the wagon-track was plowed and then dragged on 
scrapers and spread over the track itself. The 
result often was to make possible even deeper mud 
than before. Encouraged by signs of iron ore and 
by the discovery of limestone in the beds of streams 
at certain places, two of the early settlers built, in 
1816, a furnace near the point where Clear Run 
emptied into the creek. The enterprise was, on 
the whole, disappointing; the property passed from 
owner to owner, and furnace operations were at 
length abandoned. In 1850 all that remained to 
show where the old furnace had stood was a great 
pile of cinders. The road-makers looked upon this as 
a windfall ; loads of the cindery material were hauled 
and piled into the roadway in the neighborhood of 
the stone bridge over Clear Run. When ground up 
by many passing wheels it made a black dust. How- 
ever excellent the cinder may have been for the 
roads no child liked these repairs. The very tough- 
est bare feet protested against the heat received 



90 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

and given out by that road-stuff on a midsummer 
day; and besides that, it could cut almost like glass. 

Exactly in front of our house, in the roadway on 
the slope going down to the bridge there was for 
years a rounded stone perhaps a foot across and 
projecting five or six inches above the ground. It 
stuck there with a curious persistence, a vexation 
to drivers. At last, one road-working day, it was 
resolved to take that stone out. So the men dug 
and dug— it would never do to give in after once 
beginning. The stone proved to be much larger 
than they had expected. What they brought to 
light was a glacial boulder, two feet or more in 
diameter, rounded and polished, composed — I should 
judge now from my recollection of it — of white and 
pink quartzite. It would have been a thing of 
beauty and value in any public or private grounds 
or in a museum, telling its dramatic story of the Ice 
Age. But how could those road-makers see any 
value in it? "Can't go up er down that hill 'thout 
strikin' the plaguey stone with yer wheel." Deter- 
mined to dispose of it they got log-chains and hauled 
it with some difficulty to the pool below the bridge 
and rolled it in. That bit of road-improvement 
took place some sixty years ago; the objectionable 
stone is probably in the pool today, covered with 
many layers of mud and debris, if indeed it has not 
been deeply buried by other road-improvements of 
the style demanded by automobiles. 

Prior to 1850, fruits, especially berries, were car- 
ried beyond their natural season either by preserving 
or drying; but the preserves were undesirably rich 
and sweet and were regarded as an article for the 



THE YEAR AROUND 91 

company table. Apples were strung on long coarse 
thread and then dried in the sun or oven ; afterwards 
they were festooned from the kitchen ceiling or 
hung in the attic. Apple-butter was also made in 
quantity for every-day use. But sometime about 
1860 fruit-canning was introduced. The jars were 
earthen, fitted with tin covers; after the hot cooked 
fruit had been put into the jar and the cover adjusted 
melted sealing-wax was poured into a groove in the 
jar around the edge of the cover. It was a trouble- 
some and more or less uncertain method of keeping 
fruit, but housekeepers were glad to avail them- 
selves of it as being at least easier than preserving, 
and the fruit, when it "kept," was better than the 
dried article. And nobody complained, because no- 
body imagined the glass jar of to-day with its rub- 
ber-band and screw-top. 

Tallow was one of the very important by-products 
in the slaughtered beef-animal, because our main 
dependence for artificial light was the tallow candle. 
These candles were of two kinds: mold and dip. 
The candle-mold consisted of a set of six or twelve 
molds of the length and diameter of the desired 
candle. They were evenly spaced and rigidly welded 
together, opening into a common pan-like top while 
the other ends tapered to small open tips. Wicks 
of cotton were passed over small sticks lying across 
the face of the pan, then passed through the molds 
and carried out of the small end-openings and tied 
in knots to keep them taut. The melted tallow 
was then poured into the molds and they were set 
aside to cool and harden. The skill in this kind of 
candle-making was called for when the candles 



92 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

were lifted from the molds by means of the cross- 
sticks. All on one stick had to come out at once; 
unless great care were used a candle or two was 
sure to crack and be wrecked. For the dip candle 
wicks of proper length were strung on a long slen- 
der stick and the whole stickful dipped into a kettle 
of melted tallow. It was hung on one side to cool 
and later dipped again to get another coating of 
tallow; having a set of these sticks the candle-maker 
dipped each one in turn. This process was kept up 
until the candles had grown to sufficient size when 
they were slipped off the sticks and stored away. 
The molded candles were better-looking because 
more symmetrical, but the dip candles had no excuse 
for cracking or breaking. 

Butchering hogs, late in the autumn, was one of 
the heavy tasks in the year's work — heavy for men 
and women alike. The hogs had to be killed and 
scalded and scraped, dressed and cut up; then the 
women took hold. Besides the main portions: 
hams, shoulders, pork and bacon, — accounted for 
to the smoke-house or the pork-barrel in the cellar — 
there was sausage-meat to be ground and lard to 
be tried out and last of all, headcheese and souse to 
be made. For days the place was one of pork, yet 
everybody lived patiently through the toil and 
grease, knowing that the year's store of food was 
receiving large and valuable additions. 

The raising of animals for beef and pork and 
mutton was a matter of so much importance to 
those early home-fed families that no one can be 
surprised by the fact that poultry-raising was made 
an incidental and trifling feature in the progi'am of 



THE YEAR AROUND 93 

the farm-year. Nobody thought that a hen needed 
any special attention — except when she was found 
in the garden. On the farm of this narrative the 
fowls got their good living by picking up grain 
where the cattle and hogs were fed; they roosted 
on a variety of perches and nested where they 
pleased: in the haymow, under mangers, in the fan- 
ning-mill, in various dusty nooks in the carriage- 
house, and in brush-heaps. Consequently, eggs 
were not collected, they were "hunted." Hunting 
the eggs was one of the happy chores that I under- 
took for grandmother. I used to start out with a 
little old basket, only half hearing grandmother's 
injunction, "Don't get up where you can't get 
down." Sometimes a new nest v/as found and an 
extra haul of eggs secured; then I returned to the 
house elated and demanded that she "guess now!" 
for her guessing was the climax. Tactful kindly 
grandmother; how she invariably began with some 
ridiculously low number, — in order, I think, that I 
might not be disappointed. Occasionally a "setting- 
hen" was found, a very cross hen in no mood to be 
poked off by a little girl after all that trouble to 
hide her nest. The announcement of this discovery 
was followed by a consultation; what should we do 
about it. "W'y," grandmother would say, looking 
judicially at me over the top of her spectacles, "I 
guess she might as well go on setting, and we will 
see how many chickens she brings off ; a stolen nest 
is generally the luckiest." In this manner was 
poultry-raising carried on, yet there never seemed to 
be any lack of eggs or chickens. 

The "egg-money," like the "butter-money," fol- 



94 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

lowing a folk-custom as strong as law, belonged to 
the farmer's wife. Those happy-go-lucky hens 
must have sent many a dollar to foreign missions by 
grandmother's hand. 



CHAPTER XL 
THE COUNTY FAIR 

"Bring out your premium stock!" 

— Ring Marshal. 

Our largest festival, one comprising the whole 
countryside, was the annual fair conducted by the 
Licking County Agricultural Society. Without sen- 
timent or ceremonies it was, nevertheless, a charac- 
teristic institution which would need to be reckoned 
with in any comparative study of harvest festivals 
in various lands and times. 

Isaac Stadden had great luck hunting in the 
autumn of 1800; for, besides finding that company 
of five men around their camp-fire in Ramp Creek 
Valley, he also discovered the remarkable prehistoric 
earth-structure later known as the Old Fort. "A 
circular earthwork with high banks and a deep ditch 
inside was a curiosity" and, as the records state, he 
went back the next day, accompanied by his wife, to 
make explorations. They found the embankment 
to be about a mile in circumference and varying 
from five to fifteen feet in height, the circle being 
broken only by an imposing entrance on the east, on 
either side of which the ditch was deepest and the 
wall highest. Stadden or some other hunter must 
have early found another remarkable though less 

95 



96 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

artificial "curiosity" in this wilderness. One writer 
of the county history says : 

Between the Raccoon and South Fork, near their junction, 
covering an area oT a number of square miles and extending 
several miles west of Newark existed at the first settlement 
of the country a grove of the wild cherry, doubtless the 
growth of centuries, which for numbers, size and quality, has 
probably never been equalled in any section of the United 
States. They were thick, tall and straight, of wide-spreading 
branches, tolerably clear of knots, and generally sound, except 
those that gave indications of great age. But few of them 
were chopped up to 1825. Many of them stood on the works 
of the mound-builders. The concentric circles of many of 
these showed them to be centuries old. 

In 1860 the cherry-trees were gone and the usual 
variety of other forest trees had taken their place; 
but the grove had already given a name to the dis- 
trict in which it once flourished, and "Cherry Valley" 
will always and properly remind its English-speak- 
ing dwellers of the kind of trees that were growing 
there in 1800*. 

Cherry Valley is not, however, a valley in the 
ordinary meaning of the term but rather a low 
bottom-land between two streams about to unite. 
Closely related to the Centerville plain both geo- 
graphically and topographically, it was, like Center- 

*These cherry-trees were undoubtedly Prunus serotina. "It 
is one of the most valuable trees of the American forests, 
sometimes attaining the height of 80-100 ft., with straight 
columnar scaly-barked trunk 3^5 ft. in thickness . . . One of 
the chief elements of many tracts of forests of the Appala- 
chian regions." — Hough: Handbook of Trees of the Northern 
States and Canada. 



THE COUNTY FAIR 97 

ville, a favorite district with the mound-builders; 
for the Old Fort was located in this Valley and 
associated with it were various other more or less 
elaborate earthworks. 

The Agricultural Society had secured this Old 
Fort for fair-ground purposes. It was like holding 
a bazaar at Stonehenge. Of the hundreds of people 
who gathered in those grounds each year probably 
only a few, if any, were interested in the fact that 
the great circular embankment with its inside moat 
and stately entrance was the work of a vanished 
race. It was a "curiosity" — which is quite different 
from saying that they were curious about its history 
and purpose. "Old Fort" was their nearest approach 
to a hypothesis, and they let it go at that. The 
embankment was wide at its base: thirty-five to 
fifty-five feet, the archaeologists now say; its slopes, 
long since settled down to an angle of repose, were 
shaded by magnificent oaks; the great trees also 
grew on the crest of the embankment and in the 
waterless moat which closely corresponded in 
dimensions with the raised earthwork; and besides 
these trees many others stood here and there, singly 
or in clumps, throughout the enclosed space which 
was itself large enough for a farm. This distribu- 
tion of trees, together with the extraordinary em- 
bankment, gave a distinctive quality to the place. 
I was old enough to feel its dignity though not old 
enough to analyze the feeling; and as I had never 
been to any other fair I was disposed to conclude 
that all fairs were held on such grounds. 

Grandfather's family and ours usually combined 
for the ride to the fair; and since the two-horse 



98 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

wagon would hold so many and so much it was 
brought out and swept clean and boards were laid 
across the wagon-bed and covered with horse- 
blankets. Under these seats the dinner-baskets 
and the bags of feed for the horses were stowed 
away; also, carefully packed, whatever small articles 
were to be exhibited. Then, with everything ready 
and the horses rather restive, we got aboard; the 
elder folks sedately, we children breathlessly by way 
of the hubs,— anything to be safe in that wagon 
and sure of going. We joined the procession; it 
was indeed a procession. As far as one could see, 
westward toward town or eastward down Center- 
ville, two-horse wagons, lumber wagons, buggies, 
sulkies, carriages, made an almost continuous line. 
As we went on the few gaps were soon filled because 
our neighbors were coming out of their big gates in 
their two-horse wagons. Centerville Street was 
familiar but it was a more or less new world to me 
when we turned off east of the school-house to the 
Cherry Valley road. Two features of that drive 
are unclouded pictures in my memory at this day. 
One was a piece of beech-woods that we passed; 
how many acres I cannot guess. The great clean 
trees stood thick, crowding one another and they 
were all beeches; apparently not another tree grew 
there. I heard nobody comment on this and no- 
body seemed to think it remarkable that such a piece 
of woods should exist. Had other trees as saplings 
been removed or had fit beech-saplings exterminated 
the others? Besides seeing those beeches the other 
delightful experience was the fording of Raccoon 
Creek. The road crossed a sunny piece of bottom- 



THE COUNTY FAIR 99 

land and on the other side of the creek wound steep- 
ly up a heavily-timbered bluff. How pleasant were 
those few minutes when we stopped in midstream 
and the driver went out on the wagon-tongue and 
unchecked the horses so that they could drink. The 
water rippled around our wagon-wheels, coming 
nearly up to the hubs. Great straight trees stood 
along the bluff face and on top of it, while smaller 
ones heavy with grape-vines leaned over the water; 
the damp cool ground was rich in ferns and autumn 
flowers. Even the promised splendors of the fair 
were forgotten by me in that bewitching wild spot. 
But the horses had drunk and other teams were 
pushing for place in the water, "Hey! When you 
fellows goin' on?" was the good-natured suggestion 
received by our driver from those following us. We 
went on, — one small person in the wagon happily 
reflecting that we must come home that way and 
the fording-place could be seen again. 

In the wide space outside the entrance to the 
fair-ground the confusion and jam was worse than 
anywhere else, but we somehow got tickets and our 
team was skilfully guided through the gate to a 
breathing-spot of quiet where the horses could be 
unhitched. How very distracting to have to see so 
much in one short day! We made the rounds of 
the stock exhibit where many pieces of scantling 
had been freshly and wantonly jabbed into those 
ancient artificial slopes to build pens for sheep and 
hogs, horses and cattle. We went up and down 
through the "fine arts" building, the poultry-houses, 
the horticultural hall. Ducks and calves and 
squashes and cut flowers, embroidery and jellies and 



100 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

ears of corn — the prides of many homesteads — 
were here displayed, each owner intent on winning 
a blue ribbon. I had believed that my omti dear 
ducks were the finest ever; and now I saw that they 
were not. And "Billy," our white-faced young 
horse Billy; could there be any better horse in the 
countryside? I was made to realize that there 
could be, though, if my memory does not fail me on 
this point, Billy did come home one year wearing a 
red ribbon. I recall one mammoth pumpkin which 
was certainly larger than any I had ever seen in 
grandfather's fields. How had anybody ever got a 
pumpkin to grow so big? It was an early lesson 
read to me at that Pair, a hard and wholesome one 
the full meaning of which I did not grasp until long 
afterwards: Try as you will, somebody else is prob- 
ably going to get the blue ribbons. Life's satisfac- 
tions and compensations must be sought in other 
forms than laurels. 

The relative, whoever he might be, whose coat- 
skirts I must hold onto or get lost, often wanted to 
stop and stand and stand at the ring-raihng to 
watch the trotting. In itself trotting was well 
enough if people wouldn't crowd so against a little 
girl; but watching it was, in my judgment, a clear 
waste of time as long as there was one coop of 
turkeys yet un visited. 

In 1850-1860 whatever you ate in the middle of 
the day — no matter what the circumstances — ^was 
dinner. Nobody would have understood such a pro- 
posal as Tweedledum's, "Let's fight till six, and 
then have dinner." Luncheons were unknown, — 
at the fair as at the school-house and the sugar- 



THE COUNTY FAIR 101 

camp. Twelve o'clock was the hour to meet at the 
wagon and get out the dinner-baskets. But before 
that time we had found uncle Charles's folks, at 
least some of them, and perhaps they are bringing 
their baskets over to our wagon. Uncle Charles 
Wallace lived on the Pike east of Jacksontown. 
His wife was Orlena Winchell, a daughter of Silas 
Winchell. To see uncle Charles and aunt Orlena 
and the troop of mother's Wallace cousins was one 
of the happiest features of the day. Indeed, the 
social side of the fair was hardly less important 
than the agricultural and industrial part of it. Kjns- 
folk and friends got together on the ground and 
visited while they ate. Uncle was an exhibitor; he 
always brought something of marked merit from 
that farm of his out in the black-loamed Reservoir 
country. When I recall his many plates of hand- 
some apples on the tables in the horticultural hall I 
wonder whether I have too highly rated that hill- 
side orchard overlooking Clear Run. Probably 
Horace Wolcott and Charles Wallace compared 
notes and were brotherly rivals, each benefiting 
from the other's experience. 

The afternoon, if it was one of the later days of 
the fair and the premiums had been awarded, 
brought quite a new excitement; the ring marshal, 
wearing a brilliant sash and mounted on a high- 
stepping tall horse, rode around the ring and in a 
thundering voice ordered, "Bring out your premium 
stock!" They brought it out. Through the ring-open- 
ing, far over on the side where the stock exhibit was 
housed, came the long procession: trotting horses, 
work horses and colts, steers and cows and calves — 



102 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

each animal with a driver or leader. How many 
superior animals our county possessed ! I was proud 
to think of it,— and so I woke to the sense of com- 
munity, the group-consciousness as opposed to the 
individual. Yes, those beautiful shiny cows were 
Licking County cows — and Licking was my county. 
At the same time I felt a distinct tinge of envy of 
that half-grown boy — not of our neighborhood — 
as he came along in the parade, proud yet embar- 
rassed, managing with much effort and indifferent 
success his own premium stock: a sleek dancing 
colt. Part of the time the boy led the colt and 
quite as often the colt led the boy. There should 
have been at least a red ribbon tied to the boy's 
cap in token of the colt's success. Perhaps it was 
also clear to older folks — the wise ones — that the 
frisky young animal had other points of merit not 
taken into account by the judges in awarding the 
first premium; he had contributed already to the 
education of the lad. 

But what I saw was a be-ribboned colt in a boy's 
hands. They would likely never give me a colt to 
train ; I could only chop up nubbins for calves. And 
they never even let me drive Billy — he was "high- 
spirited," they said. In the middle of the nineteenth 
century there were limits to the concessions that 
even the most liberal father and grandfather could 
make to a girl who wanted to do everything that a 
boy did. Not because a boy did it — heaven forbid ! — 
but because of the fact that to climb apple-trees and 
drive horses and swim in the creek were surely the 
most joyful activities that any one, boy or girl, could 
engage in. 



THE COUNTY FAIR 103 

Where now, I wonder, is that premium-winning 
boy, that young "Hector, tamer of horses." Does he 
sit on the porch of some Licking County farm-house, 
recalhng the victories of his youth and suspiciously 
eyeing his grandson's Ford at the gate; or did he 
abandon the farm in the behef that success dwells 
in sordid towns? There is a bare chance that he 
is a philosopher now, — having learned what the colt 
began to teach him. 

At the close of the fair-day, tired but satisfied, 
we came along home through the thick cloud of 
dust that lay on Cherry Valley and CenteiTille. 
Climbing down rather stiffly out of the wagon we 
were glad we did not have to ride as far as all those 
people who were going on through the town and out 
on those westward roads. The Fair w^as great, but 
one would hardly want to go every day. There 
were trees at home, and grandfather's sheep were 
to be seen all the time. And I did not despise my 
ducks; they were pretty good ducks, after all. 



CHAPTER XII. 

AUTUMN DAYS ON THE FARM 

All goes well and the goose hangs high. 

— Proverb of Welfare. 

One year, further back than my memory runs, 
grandfather had received a premium — solid silver 
spoons — from the Agricultural Society for the best 
field of wheat in the county. We used those spoons 
every day and grandfather kept on raising superior 
wheat every year; but in spite of the wheat, corn 
was the crop of the farm. The rich black bottom 
was regularly assigned to the noble sub-tropical 
grain. If every other crop had failed we could 
have lived on Indian corn for a year and that in a 
variety of forms. Roasting-ears came early; there 
were kinds that could be speeded up to come extra 
early. As the weeks went on we had succotash, 
the appetizing Indian dish of corn and beans cooked 
together. Later our corn-food took the form of 
samp. Choice ears were selected from corn which 
had passed the milk stage; a carpenter's plane 
was inverted and the ears drawn across the blade. 
The samp made from this coarsely-cut corn was a 
dish fit for Indians or kings or colonists. We had, 
of course, various kinds of corn-breads made from 
corn which was ground at the same old handy mill 
across the run where the wheat went. The kind 

104 



AUTUMN DAYS ON THE FARM 105 

that seemed to be most distinctly a bread was 
known as "rye-an'-Injun," a most wholesome and 
highly relished bread containing some rye flour com- 
bined with the Indian meal. Even mother, careful 
and correct as she was in her use of Enghsh, never 
called this bread anything but rye-an' -Injun. By 
any other name it would not have been so good. 

The Racoon-bottom corn, like that grown on 
other creek and river bottoms of the Ohio Valley, 
was very tall with immense golden ears, — Ceres' 
happiest dream of a grain. One may well marvel 
that such a quantity of food-vegetation could spring 
in a single season from a few acres of soil merely 
fertilized by the muddy waters of an overflowing 
creek. 

1859 is memorable in Granville history as the 
year of the great frost. Busnell writes: 

All day Saturday, June 4th, a strong cold wind blew. At 
night a calm fell upon the air. On Sunday morning, June 
5th, there was a very heavy frost, seriously damaging all 
field crops, gardens and fruits. Some of the corn was knee 
high. Some farmers at once proceeded to plow up and plant 
anew. Others planted between the rows, designing to take 
their choice of the two crops as soon as a preference should 
be indicated. Others relied solely on the old. The result 
was generally in favor of replanting. 

I well remember going with grandfather down to 
the bottom in the morning to see the ruin; though 
it was probably Monday morning when I first saw 
the great field in its devastated condition. What 
had been thrifty com two days before was now 
black and shrivelled, so severe was the freezing. 
Grandfather decided to plant again, and at once set 



106 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

to work to plant more seed in the hills beside the 
frozen young stalks, first cutting off these withered 
stalks with sheep-shears. I do not recall, nor can I 
find any record, how the second planting resulted. 
Much must have depended on the date of the first 
severe frost in the following September. This frost 
of June 5, 1859, was unfortunately not local; it ex- 
tended throughout the State and most of the wheat 
was destroyed. Granville township's great concern 
over the loss of the corn indicates that corn rather 
than wheat was its most important crop. 

After corn-cutting the corn was left in the shock 
and husked by degrees. We children were quite 
able to walk around the hill and to the remotest 
corners of the farm, but it suited us to happen up 
to the barnyard, sharp November mornings, when 
the wagon was going to get the fodder and the corn 
which had been husked the day before. Later, when 
there were light falls of snow, we went on the big 
sled ; above all things a sled-ride must not be missed. 
When those first trips were made the driver had to 
pick his way through the field on account of the 
pumpkins that strewed the ground; but the pump- 
kins gradually came in with the corn to be heaped 
up in the carriage-house until used. 

Grandfather's granary, capable of holding many 
bushels of corn, was at the north end of a building 
called the carriage-house, — a large carriage-room 
occupying the centre, and a calf-stable the south 
end. As the building stood on sloping ground it 
was arranged so that the hogs could come beneath 
it. The floor of the granary had a large and con- 
venient knot-hole in it near the door. Grandfather 



AUTUMN DAYS ON THE FARM 107 

knew perfectly well of its existence though he could 
hardly have guessed how many extra feeds his hogs 
received through it. We shelled corn and dropped 
the grain through, just to hear them come running 
— pigs and half-grown chickens, hogs and hens — 
all mixed up together; then we looked down to see 
them eat. Next to feeding himself, normal man 
whether barbarian or civilized has ever found pleas- 
ure in feeding the creatures he has domesticated. 

But mid-autumn brought one piece of harvest 
work far more exciting than corn-cutting and husk- 
ing — the apple-picking. Ladders were brought out, 
barrels were brushed and sunned, and the pickers 
went into the trees. Many apples fell on the soft 
grass but the finest were carefully picked by hand. 
There were the sweet Vandevers in their shining 
deep-red coats, the rough Russets hard as stones 
and noted as "good keepers," the golden aristocratic 
Bellflowers. And the Rambos. James Whitcomb 
Riley, hardly less the poet of Ohio than Indiana, 
understood and wrote: 

When Autumn shakes the rambo-tree — 
It's a long, sweet way across the orchard! 

Whatever the fragrance of other apples, none ever 
approached the Rambo; who could tell whether it 
appealed more to the sense of taste or smell. Have 
the years robbed it of its delectable qualities that 
it can now be found only in old orchards? 

A team may make a way among pumpkins and 
piles of corn, but gathering up barrels full of apples 
in a hillside orchard was plainly a matter for extra 
skill and judgment. Yet the wagon never did tip 



108 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

over; all those barrels came safely by the long wind- 
ing road through the pasture down to the carriage- 
house. 

Thanksgiving Day seemed to separate autumn 
from winter and to put a full stop to the outdoor 
toil of the year. It was a holiday for the men but 
certainly involved rather more work than usual for 
the women. On the preceding day poultry had to 
be dressed, mince and pumpkin and apple-pies made, 
cake and bread baked, accompanied with a general 
tidjing-up for the Day. When this extra array of 
food had been set away in the "butt'ry" on Thanks- 
giving eve and leisure had come to the kitchen the 
young men made bullets ; they would be going hunt- 
ing tomorrow ; if a light snow fell tonight they could 
track rabbits; it would be a good day for squirrels, 
anyhow. The lead was melted in a little shallow 
iron dish with a long handle and then poured into 
the mold which resembled a pair of pincers; the 
mold was presently opened and the shining bullet 
rolled out on the hearth. One being made at a time 
the bullets accumulated slowly but at length there 
were enough or the supply of lead was used up. 
Then the guns were cleaned and the powder-horns 
— real horns — were filled. A breech-loading, cart- 
ridge-carrying gun would have been a wonder in 
Ohio at that time. 

And thus, on Thanksgiving morning, these wood- 
chopping, corn-husking young fellows, through a 
well-meant ordinance of church and state, had an 
opportunity to revert to the mental condition and 
physical behavior of their primitive hunting fore- 
bears. To be sure they reverted at other times ; for 



AUTUMN DAYS ON THE FARM 109 

the pelt of some animal or other was a fixed decora- 
tion of the inside of the wood-house door. Boys 
whose Marietta grandfather had been a notable 
bear-hunter could at least catch or shoot muskrats 
and skunks and wild pigeons.* 

One or two members of the household went to 
church; the spiritual average, as well as the good 
repute, of the family was perhaps maintained in 
this way. But there were others who could neither 
go hunting nor go to meeting; for there was the 
dinner to get — more devotion to the cooking-stove, 
in spite of all of yesterday's work. How patiently 
the women submitted to that form of giving thanks 
which expressed itself in a loaded and overloaded 
table when each day's dinner was ample. 

The medicine cupboard of 1860 showed little 
advance beyond that of 1810. We were still without 
recognized antiseptics, and camphor was almost the 
only "boughten" remedy for aches and pains. But 
mother-lore and mother-wit were suffering no 
decline and well-tested homely and home-made 
remedies were known to us. Though as regarded 
one disease — consumption — Nature's absolute rem- 
edial requirement of fresh clean air in plenty for 
ailing lungs seems not to have been perceived by 
any one sixty years ago ; and with the help of closed 
and darkened rooms the scourge had its own way 
among the young people, particularly the young 
women who unfortunately had less life in the open 
air than the young men had. 

Every summer and fall, mother, in common with 

*Appendix. Note B. 



110 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

her neighbors, gathered and dried catnip, hoarhound, 
pennyroyal, boneset and snakeroot. Peppers raised 
in the garden should be added to this list, since a 
gargle of mild pepper tea was a standard remedy 
for ordinary sore-throat. These herbs hung in 
great bunches from the attic rafters and the kitchen 
ceiling; that is, all of them except the snakeroot, — 
it scarcely had time to dry. As regularly as autumn 
came we children were shaken with malaria, "fever 
'n' ague" it was then called. The creek and mill- 
pond were regarded as somehow causing this ail- 
ment, and in particular it was charged to the fogs 
which rose over the water and low lands. Mother 
had great faith in snakeroot as a remedy for ague; 
so a bowl of snakeroot tea usually simmered on the 
back of the stove during the ague season. What 
quantities w^e were made to drink of the bitter 
amber-colored liquid, — and how we shook with 
chills and burnt with fever every other day until the 
frosts came. On the whole, however, we were hardy, 
healthful children, and mother seldom had to resort 
to her home-made medicines ; and still less frequent- 
ly did she call a doctor. Yet her life must have 
been one of unceasing care and watchfulness; she 
was alert as well as busy throughout the day and 
at night — as she sometimes half seriously declared 
— "slept with one eye open and one foot out of 
bed." One momentous incident in our family his- 
tory showed mother's resourcefulness and daring. 
It was late in the autumn of 1862; father was in the 
army and mother was alone with her little children 
except as great need occasionally brought in a 
"hired girl." An epidemic of diptheria came upon 



AUTUMN DAYS ON THE FARM 111 

the community; and no one knew then the desper- 
ate character of that disease, — though they might 
have guessed it from the number of homes which 
it desolated — hence no precautions were taken 
against infection; we were all ill, — all except Anna 
who, happily, had gone to spend some weeks with 
relatives. The physician called regularly, but his 
treatment availed little. One evening on his rounds 
he looked at the youngest child, Willard, then four 
years old ; he remarked that the child was dying and 
that he could do nothing more; then he left us. 
But Ruth Wolcott was not in vain the daughter of 
long lines of intrepid pioneers. What was any doc- 
tor's word that on it she should give up hope for her 
little one? She instantly directed her helper to 
bring a tub and fill it full of warm water— as hot as 
a baby's skin could bear it. I can see that tub now, 
placed in the middle of the living-room floor; the 
room was like a small hospital ward: we were all 
sick there together. The water ready, mother 
stripped the little fellow, put him into it up to his 
neck for some minutes, then wrapped him in a 
woolen blanket and returned him to his bed. He 
began at once to breathe more easily; the dreadful 
crisis was past, and in the morning the doctor was 
astonished to find the child not only alive but recov- 
ering. 

The varied program from seed-time to harvest 
completed, winter was a season to rest and pull one- 
self together for the coming spring. There were 
no theatres, no moving-picture shows, no ice-cream 
parlors. The community sentiment in Granville 
was positively and uncompromisingly against danc- 



112 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

ing and card-playing. With these worldly pleasures 
under ban an occasional singing-school or spelling- 
match in the school-house became a valuable outlet 
for youthful spirits. The churches vied with one 
another in starting and conducting religious reviv- 
als. Whether wholesome or unwholesome these 
revival meetings certainly cooperated with the 
school-house gatherings in furnishing excitement 
in the lives of young folks naturally keen for 
some emotional life. One would suppose that New- 
ark might have afforded means of amusement, not 
to say dissipation; but in the 1850's Newark was a 
distant and foreign city — a place where you went 
when you had to: to take the train, or to attend to 
law business. 

We were of course without the modern machines 
and instruments designed to aid in work or to pro- 
mote pleasure. To see the life of that day one must 
blot out not only the automobile and the telephone, 
but also the victrola, the kodak and bicycle, the 
type-writer and flash-light and fountain-pen. Yet 
who can say we lived in privation lacking these 
things? We had vigorous bodies and fairly active 
minds. The mind had encouragement in activity 
for it encountered the raw materials of its environ- 
ment; native ingenuity was not smothered by pos- 
session of the exceptional inventor's constructions. 
A pile of clean corn-cobs held sources of happiness 
for a child that the owner of expensive mechanical 
toys cannot know. Corn-cobs are adaptable; they 
become building timbers or live stock or garden 
walls as imagination's occasion requires. 



AUTUMN DAYS ON THE FARM 113 

We did indeed lack the wealth of pictures which 
the camera brings now to eveiy home; on the other 
hand we were spared the comic page of the modern 
daily paper. It is truly to be regretted that we 
httle folks were ignorant of the poems and biograph- 
ies which "every child should know"; but we were 
happily unacquainted with to-day's cheap magazines 
as well as the cheap favorites of to-day's fiction 
library. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

A CHILD OF THE OHIO EIGHTEEN-FIFTIES 

Ho, my little wild heart! 
Come up here to me out o' the dark. 
Or let me come to you! 

—JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. 

It does not need to be pointed out that all farm 
operations, from garden-making to corn-husking, 
were full of interest to the children of this story. We 
looked on eagerly even if we could not help, and 
we learned how to do things by being around when 
things were done. The properties of matter, the 
behavior of plants and animals, the effects of wea- 
ther, were studied in this undesigned laboratory and 
we never realized that we were studying and learn- 
ing. The life of the child in the modern village or 
town is poor indeed compared to one on an Ohio 
farm in the 1850's. But parallel with the series of 
activities which everybody recognized as work we 
ran another line which we rejoiced in as all our own. 
It began in the spring when the frost, if not com- 
pletely out of the ground, had come out enough so 
that sassafras roots could be dug. Sassafras grew 
most abundantly in the corners of the rail fence 
that separated the fields from the woods over to- 
ward Alligator Hill. Deacon Wright's lane would 
be very muddy; a confused and discouraged runlet 
from a small spring tried to find a way for itself in 

114 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-PIPTIES 115 

tliat lane; hence the mud. We "mired" sometimes, 
and sometimes traveled like chipmunks along the 
fence ; but we always reached the sassafras thickets, 
and whatever the labor necessary we dug up plenty 
of the fragrant, aromatic roots. Then, since the 
only proper way to make sassafras tea is to use 
maple sap, we had to beg somebody to come with 
an auger and tap one tree on the hillside and rig 
it up with spile and pail so that we could get enough 
sap by the usual method. This tea needed no sweet- 
ening and maybe it drowned the memories of the 
snakeroot tea of the preceding autumn. 

Presently the wild flowers began to come. I knew 
just where each kind would be found and led my 
little band of followers to the preferred homes of 
the different ones. The best place of all was the 
wooded bank that separated the terrace, or upper 
bottom, from the real bottom. This bank was much 
too steep for the plow and as it was bordered both 
above and below by cultivated fields the stock had 
never ranged there; nor was the timber yet needed. 
When we children threaded its green tangles it must 
have been in essentially the same condition in which 
little Indian children of two hundred years before 
had known it in their hunts for wild grapes and but- 
ternuts. Somewhere on this bluff we found prac- 
tically all the kinds of wild flowers that we admitted 
to our lists: wake-robins, blood-root, windflowers, 
liverwort, Jacks-in-the-pulpit, yellow violets, white 
violets, blue violets, spring-beauties, Dutchman's 
breeches, squirrel-corn, May-apples, and along with 
them the dogwood, wild-cherry and papaw blos- 
soms. 



116 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

We regularly brought some flowers home,— espe- 
cially the spring-beauties which gi-ew abundantly in 
various places; but we never picked all that we 
could find. If any of these various kinds of lovely 
spring flowers are now exterminated in Centerville 
the little Hayes children didn't do it! Looking back 
through a vista of sixty years I see those children as 
fairly good disciples of America's greatest Nature- 
teacher who 

"Loved the wood-rose, 

and left it on its stalk;" 

though none of them heard the name of Thoreau 
or read a line of his writings until long afterward. 
The wild flowers would wilt so if you picked them. 
We learned from experience that those yellow 
violets, for instance, were far more beautiful in the 
shade of the biggest sycamore-tree leaning over 
the creek than we could make them look in a dish 
in the house. The Dutchman's breeches were clan- 
nish and exclusive, preempting for their own use, if 
they could get it, a spot of several square yards of 
rich earth damp with the damp of lowland woods; 
and their generic brethren, the squirrel-coms, fol- 
lowed their example. The Dutchman's breeches 
and squirrel-corns, above all others, resented being 
carried through the sunshine to a house ; they were 
much too delicate and dependent on their own home 
in the woods. The curious blossoms of the first 
May-apples were searched for in the May-apple 
patches, — they also insisted on room just for them- 
selves. Blossoms or no blossoms, the broad leaves 
were our parasols for half an hour. Later in the 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-FIFTIES 117 

season we went back to these May-apple colonies 
and gathered some of the fruit ; anything that looked 
so good ought to be good to eat, but the May-apple 
is a disappointment ; one or two tastes were enough. 

In June the thickets of elder in the lane were 
covered with cymes of cream-white flowers. We 
gathered these blossoms to stick into mother's 
beautiful dark waving hair, — knowing somehow 
that it was the fittest flov/er for such a special use; 
and besides that, mother had happened to tell us 
that she wore elder-blossoms in her hair on the day 
of her graduation from the Seminary, Mother had 
graduated; we had vague notions as to the meaning 
of that, but anyhow she had finished school; and 
here we were just beginning to go. Every season 
mother wore the commemorative flowers, and little 
by little she told us about her school. 

With the wild flowers came the birds. Robins 
first and friendliest of all; eaves sw^allows building 
mud nests high under the eaves of the south side of 
the barn ; red-headed woodpeckers and "yellowham- 
mers" (flickers) in our best-know^n woods; wild 
doves down toward the creek and wild ducks on the 
mill-pond ; many blackbirds going in companies ; bob- 
whites in the oats-field and the corn-field, — how they 
scuttled away, those jolly bob-whites, whenever we 
tried to get good "near looks" at them. Meadow- 
larks, redbirds and pewees reported themselves to 
us through song or color; rain-crows were our 
surest sign of immediate wet weather; hoot-owls 
and screech-owls sent their lonesome notes to us 
out of the dark. We should have missed the birds 
had they failed to come to us, yet we were not on 



118 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

intimate terms with them as with the flowers and 
trees. 

The blooming of the earliest flowers and the plow- 
ing for corn meant that the fishing-season had also 
come. I could not have been more than five years 
old when mother responded to my urgings and bent 
the first pin into hook-shape, tied a coarse cotton- 
thread to it, gave me one of her carefully-saved 
corks and thus outfitted me to go fishing. In time 
I had a real barbed hook; it was almost equal to 
owning a lead-pencil. Besides Clear Run, grand- 
father's low pasture-field was traversed by that 
long head-race which conducted water from the 
run to the sawmill near the creek. The race had 
some advantages over the run: its waters moved 
with less current ; the deeper places were the haunts 
of catfish, those strong thorny catfish; the grassy 
banks were free from trees and bushes so you never 
lost your hook and line in a limb overhead. When 
the race-fishing became monotonous or unreward- 
ing we scampered across the pasture to the more 
exciting run. It had quiet little pools, and tidy 
sand-bars warm to our feet, and some steepish 
grades where the water danced and eddied among 
obstructing stones. Being barefooted we waded 
back and forth as suited our pleasure, though we 
never ventured to wade the race except at one place : 
near the foot-log where the cows had their ford. How 
much, in our judgment, they added to one's supper, 
— those few small sunfish and chubs. Mother never 
suggested that they were too few or too small; she 
loyally cooked them for us. As years were added 
to the original five my fishing-grounds were ex- 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-PIPTIES 119 

tended to include the nearest section of the creek; 
but Raccoon Creek was only Clear Run magnified. 
I may have caught fish that were a bit larger; the 
favorite place to try for them was below the frag- 
ments of an old dam, — one of those early dams that 
told of the pioneers' struggles with the creek; but 
the chief advantage of creek-fishing was the greater 
sense of adventure and of belonging to the wild. 

And besides all these riches of streams we had the 
"Reservoir." Grandfather's nearest neighbor, just 
across the road, was Norton Case. These two men 
were great friends, though Norton Case must have 
had in him a strain of originality or eccentricity 
which frequently disturbed Horace Wolcott's sense 
of what was practical and advisable. On more than 
one occasion I heard grandfather say that "Case was 
a pesky fool." Mr. Case was now the owner of the 
grist-mill on Clear Run. A head of water had been 
originally obtained by putting a dam across the 
stream several hundred feet northwest of the mill. 
About the year 1856 Mr. Case decided to make an- 
other mill-pond much larger than the old one; so 
with plows and scrapers he wi*ecked a good smooth 
field by throwng up a circular embankment. The 
water was turned in, and there the neighborhood 
was, with a sheet of water to be known as the Res- 
ervoir. On account of its name it was often con- 
fused with the great Reservoir, some miles south- 
ward from Newark, which in the eighteenth century 
the Indians called "Big Lake." Willows were planted 
at the water's edge around at least half of the bank 
of the new pond, and as they grew very rapidly the 
place soon became attractive and won approval — 



120 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

except for the ague which it was believed to pro- 
mote. Mr. Case proceeded to "waste" more land, a 
fine field north of his miniature lake, by planting it 
to all kinds of native nut-trees and wild fruits. 
Hazelnuts and black haws were soon to be seen 
in abundance — the young bushes were, though we 
realized that we would not be picking the nuts and 
haws when they came; because these bushes grew 
in rows. Whatever grew in rows couldn't be wild, 
and therefore was not for us. Young chestnuts and 
mulberry saplings were also planted there — -in rows 
— besides all sorts of more domestic berry-bushes. 
I rejoiced in Mr. Norton Case's "pesky foolishness," 
forbidden though that promising land might be. 

This new mill-pond was directly north of the tan- 
nery acres, separated therefrom by an Osage orange 
hedge. I could not jump over that hedge, and to go 
around was most inconvenient when one wanted to 
begin fishing right off; but by diligent bending, if 
not actual cutting, of some low shoots I made a sort 
of a woodchuck trail where we could crawl through 
with minimum damage to skirts and aprons. Mr. 
Case stocked his pond with fish and then let every- 
body go fishing there; yet the place was more re- 
sorted to in winter when its watery acres were 
thoroughly frozen over. Young folks came from 
town in troops and wore out the ice with their 
skating. It gave to our quiet neighborhood a gaiety 
not known at other seasons. 

The reservoir was much too deep for any bathers 
except those who were skilled in swimming; but for 
us children there were compensations in the "run." 
On midsummer days boys from town used to come 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-PIFTIES 121 

and throw low temporary dams of stones and sand 
across the run, trying first one place and then an- 
other, and thus raising the water high enough to 
make very fair swimming-holes. We kept close at 
home when those stranger-boys were meddling with 
our stream, our resentment of their invasion tem- 
pered, however, by the fact that they belonged up- 
town; they could not live down here in our fields, 
they would have to go home to their suppers. The 
boys invariably did depart at last, — and then we fell 
heirs to all their improvements. Just at dusk, ac- 
companied by mother or some other older person, 
we would go down to one of those holes in the pas- 
ture, where the willows grew, or further on down to 
the sawmill. That by-road was a comparatively un- 
traveled one and at the edge of the day we were 
quite sure to be undisturbed in our water-frolic. It 
was a piece of good fortune to enjoy home approval 
and cooperation in these twilight quasi-swims. To 
be sure, we would not have "gone swimming" with- 
out such approval though we were probably regard- 
ed as capable of it. There is hardly room to doubt 
that the neighborhood, as a whole, held us in dises- 
teem as a wild lot of little folks; this, though we 
never trespassed, and we were not noisy, — -we were 
too happily occupied with our many childish enter- 
prises to be noisy. But really proper little girls of 
1860 staid indoors, they wore their hair tightly 
braided, and they sewed sheet-seams "over and 
over." 

Far around the hill, beyond the end of the farm- 
road and standing quite apart from the woods, was 
a group of three or four trees, chief of which was a 



122 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

tall stately mulbeny-tree. Its delicious fruit may 
well have won reprieve for it when its pioneer owner 
cleared the hillside, and no doubt it had furnished 
material for some of great-grandmother Winchell's 
pies. The grass under these trees intergrown with 
spicy pennyroyal was always very short because the 
trees stood in the big pasture where the cows and 
sheep had free range; thus we could easily find the 
ripe berries after they had fallen to the ground. Con- 
venient for the sheep too, and it was important to 
get there before they had nosed the berries over. My 
sister Mariquita is sure that we climbed this mul- 
beri-y-tree by way of a grape-vine and shook the 
fruit off. I do not remember this exploit, but I pre- 
sume she is right and that we did get up into it by 
means of an enormous wild grape-\ine that grew on 
another tree close by the mulberry. Paradoxically 
stated, if we had climbed fewer trees we should have 
run greater risk of broken bones; but much experi- 
ence with trees of various kinds gave us a monkey- 
like safety in their branches. 

The mulberry could not have been veiy common 
in the primitive forests. W^ith their valuable fruit 
these trees would hardly be unnecessarily felled ; and 
if ever abundant they ought to have been so in those 
mid-century years. But with the exception of this 
tree on the Wolcott farm I do not remember having 
seen one in Licking County. Nut-trees of various 
kinds were plentiful. For instance, there was the 
beech-tree at the edge of the upper bottom where the 
ground dropped steeply down to the race, — a very 
matriarch of a tree, much older apparently, than 
those in the Cherry Valley woods. Besides being 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-PIFTIES 123 

small, beechnuts are often disappointing with their 
three faces collapsed upon a withered interior; but 
we could depend upon this old tree above the race 
for large plump nuts in plenty. The grass there 
was long and each season enough nuts escaped us 
to afford a crop of beechnut sprouts which we pulled 
up and ate the following spring as a special woods 
delicacy. 

In the little meadow which came up to the barn 
was a favorite butternut-tree where we gathered 
most of our winter supply of butternuts, and at the 
head of the lane leading to the barn was a black 
walnut tree, — lone survivor when its brothers went 
down in the clearing. Sometimes we "hulled" the 
walnuts there under the tree, — using a little stone 
and a big one. On other trips we laboriously tugged 
the nuts home in a basket and then did the hulling 
with a mallet and a block of wood. But whatever 
tool you used, your hands were sure to be so stained 
that no amount of soft soap would quite remove the 
yellow. Black-walnut stain had to wear off. 
Mother never rebuked us for these spatterings and 
stains on our suitable if homely clothes. To remedy 
such matters as best she could was in her day's 
work ; and she somehow divined that she did well for 
her little ones in letting them live close to the earth ; 
the simple relations were the wholesome ones. 
Dainty raiment and picking one's way was not 
meant for Nature's eager children. And mother 
made a distinction between "clean dirt" and grime; 
we knew much of the former and nothing of the lat- 
ter. 

At least once in the autumn our hard-working 



124 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

father would take a quarter of a day off, hitch the 
horse to the Httle lumber-wagon and give us a ride to 
some more distant walnut-tree, the owner of which 
allowed us to gather all the nuts we wanted. We 
wanted about three bushels and we were not long 
in picking up the green balls that strewed the 
ground. When the load was dumped on the grass 
back of the kitchen-shed it looked almost like a job 
ahead to think of hulling all those walnuts; but I 
liked it better than sewing carpet-rags and vastly 
better than sewing a sheet-seam over and over. The 
walnuts were hulled in time, although the coats of 
the last ones had turned black and mushy and were 
infested with disagreeable maggots. The dried nuts 
were then spread on a high shelf in the cellar above 
the apples which they so well supplemented when 
winter brought its special appreciation of every fruit 
and nut that had ripened on the trees around us ; we 
never saw any other kind. 

We went in various directions for hickory-nuts 
and chestnuts, although we found few of them, com- 
pared with the black walnuts and butternuts. Some 
mornings, after a hard frost, mother would "drop 
everything" and go chestnutting with us. Our hearts 
beat high on all those occasions when we could get 
mother out on a search for wild flowers or chest- 
nuts, and especially to slide down hill on our home- 
made hickory-runnered sled. She was young during 
the years here described ; perhaps her woods-roving 
children rescued to her, though tardily, some of the 
pleasures that had been too largely crowded out of 
a work-filled girlhood. The foragings for chest- 
nuts on those keen autumn mornings stand out with 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-FIPTIES 125 

unfading distinctness in my recollections because we 
had mother along with us. 

The best groves of papaws flourished in company 
with the sassafras on the high ground near Alligator 
Hill. Nothing else growing out of doors was ever 
more trim and clean than those papaws with their 
straight comely trunks and branches and their lux- 
uriant foliage. We rejoiced in these thickets at all 
times, but particularly in the autumn when, after a 
few hard frosts, many leaves were yet on the trees 
and others carpeting the ground and half concealing 
the yellow-green fruit which had already fallen. 
Papaws, like May-apples, certainly look good 
enough to eat; season after season we were uncon- 
vinced that they were not what they seemed to be; 
only after we had brought some of the finest-looking 
ones home and tried to eat them did we realize anew 
that they were too insipid and rich. Wild grapes 
seemed to like neighboring with the papaws, al- 
though they chose somewhat larger and stronger 
trees for their support. The best thickets of all were 
thus the ones close bordering the woods, where wild 
grapes, sassafras and papaws lived together. From 
the birch coppice of northern New England to the 
palmetto jungles of Florida I have never yet seen a 
lovelier fellowship of growing things than those 
Licking County thickets, long ago destroyed; and 
they were set like softening fringes on the borders 
of the woods. 

The general name "woods," becoming singular in 
my mind, means that pathless unmarred piece of 
forest which covered the Welsh Hills as late as 1860, 
because the trees were so large, of so many kinds 



126 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

and stood so thickly on the ground. With the feel- 
ing of explorers we would get ourselves enwrapped 
with woods until in only one direction were there 
even distant glimpses of cleared land; but to lose 
sight of all fields would mean that we were lost; so 
we took care to keep a bit of a rail fence in view. The 
hurricanes or tornadoes that at long intervals struck 
the western woods left wreck behind them in the 
shape of great trees overturned. After the lapse of 
many years when branch, trunk and root had de- 
cayed there remained an oblong heap of earth — the 
earth that had been torn up with the roots when the 
tree went over; and beside the mound was a corres- 
ponding depression where the tree had stood. These 
mounds were to be seen, several of them, in grand- 
father's hillside woods and many others were scat- 
tered through the Welsh Hills forest. Caleb Atwater, 
writing in 1838, says: 

In May, 1825, a tornado swept across Licking and Knox 
Counties. Its width was scarcely one mile, but where it 
moved it prostrated every forest tree or stripped it of its 
leaves and left it standing as a monument of its inexorable 
wrath. 

By the Granville people this was known as the 
"Burlington Storm" because its effects were most 
severely felt in Burlington township which lies north- 
ward from Granville. The mounds around us might 
well have been memorial outliers of the famous 
storm of 1825. But we children regarded them as 
Indian mounds or graves; though I never could de- 
cide in my own mind whether the Indian was buried 
beneath the hummock or in the hollow. Plainly 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-FIFTIES 127 

there were cogent reasons for either view. The 
sweeping winds had a habit of filling these little hol- 
lows with leaves, packing them down and heaping 
them up as if it were a good place to keep such 
sweepings in. How fragrant and clean the leaves 
were and how joyously we tossed them about and 
burrowed in their depths. A haycock in the hay- 
field, now, must not be strewn about; nor may 
sheaves of wheat be moved — no matter how good a 
tent you think you could make by just taking out the 
inside sheaves of a shock. But no farm rules 
reached a leaf-filled hollow; that was our domain. 

The woods probably made more impression on us 
because they were open and free from undergrowth ; 
in fact, there were hardly enough saplings to main- 
tain the continuity of the forest even if the white 
man had not resolved to destroy it. We were on 
the under side of a leafy cover and could go about 
unhindered and look up into the branches of these 
tall trees which, both in the aggregate and indivi- 
dually, had charm for us. We enjoyed as such the 
black walnuts, beeches, oaks, ash, hickories, chest- 
nuts, and maples. I supposed all woods were like 
these around my home. Intimate friendship with 
them prepared me to later understand and defend 
Audubon's exclamation: "The beautiful, the darling 
forests of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky!" 

Morris Schaff, at home in these same Licking 
County woods, writes in his Etna and Kirkersville : 

Save now and then a thicket of leafy young oaks and 
beeches, the woods were open and free. The views off 
through them over the carpet of dead leaves, lit up here and 
there with a splash of sunshine, and now and then some 



128 WILD TURICEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

bush in bloom; the grand uplifting trees, silent, and yet every 
one speaking; the fallen trees lying mute, some this way and 
some that, the moss weaving their last shroud; the wind 
traveling through the high tops, and now and then breaking 
into a sigh; the squirrels, some frisking, some sitting up on 
limbs with their tails proudly arched over their backs and 
barking huskily in complaining tones; the birds, some like 
the woodpeckers, chattering at their labor, and now and then 
a sudden flash of living color as a jay bird came by, now and 
then a faint trill, the falling nuts, and the evoking silence as 
the leaves came down, — all these were given to me to enjoy 
again and again in the primeval woods of Ohio. I wish that 
there was some way that a just idea could be transferred 
to this page of the splendor of those woods, when on every 
hand there rose those stately oaks, ash, sycamores, and 
black walnuts, all lifting their heads like kings far up into 
the sky to greet sun and moon and stars.* 

In 1805 settlers knew these forests as something 
to be cleared out of the way with all possible des- 
patch. The next generation regarded what re- 
mained — and much remained — from the lumber- 
man's point of view: how many feet of lumber would 
a given lot of trees saw; how many cords of fire- 
wood would it cut. 

Likewise, these men knew birds either as game- 
birds to be shot, or as supposedly injurious to crops 
in fields and gardens, and hence to be shot. It was 
one of the pathetic features of the pioneer's life that 
his struggle with his environment closed his eyes to 
most of its beauty. Happily for the world and all 
coming time, the Ohio Valley early lured to it a few 
men like the Michaux, father and son, and Audubon, 
who refused to "settle." They were free and they 
had seeing eyes; they reported on that wealth of 
wild life, whether bird or animal, tree or flower, that 

♦Appendix. Note A. 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-FIPTIES 129 

they found in the valley of "la belle riviere," the O- 
hee-yuh of the Indians. 

It must in justice be said, however, that the formal 
yards of the Wild Turkey period were not destitute 
of trees*. Here and there one was spared as being 
somehow useful or ornamental; and now and then 
one was set out. Bushnell records that in 1842 the 
Town Council of Granville passed an ordinance 
which permitted each lot-owner to take in a certain 
number of feet and required him in turn to make 
a walk of specified width "and to set out rows of 
trees in line, twelve inches inside the outer line of 
the walk, with suitable protection." Maples, es- 
pecially hard maples, must have been the favorites 
in this planting of 1842, for fifteen years later the 
sidewalks on most of the streets were maple-shaded. 
Shade for the country roads depended on the action 
of individuals ; there was no community cooperation. 
I am glad to remember one frosty autumn morning 
when it was my part to hold up straight the maple 
saplings which father was setting out on the bank 
above the road in front of our house. Those young 
trees were well and truly planted — father never did 
anything "by halves" — they lived and throve and 
in 1917 there were two which neither storms nor 
axe had laid low; for sixty years they have been 
speaking of that regard for the street and the home. 

The autumn of 1858 is memorable. Donati's 
splendid comet, easily premier among the nineteenth 
century comets, hung night after night in the sky 
over the old grist-mill. In the late t\vilight we used 
to gather outside the kitchen-shed to look at it. 
The rather awe-struck tones of my elders were not 



130 WILD TURICEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

calculated to lessen my fear of the long shining 
object; the moon never looked like that, neither did 
any star. What was it? I was now afraid out of 
doors in the dark and even more afraid to go indoors 
and go to bed in a dark room. The comet was of 
the class "scarey" things and filled me with fresh 
fear of all those dangerous and mysterious creatures 
which usually lurk under the beds of imaginative lit- 
tle girls and boys who are only seven years old. After 
a while the comet went away, — nobody seemed to 
know just where it did go; but we saw it no more 
above the mill. Later there were persons who were 
quite certain it had come as a messenger of evil: a 
sign of the Civil War that so soon broke upon our 
peace. 

Mother must have known the elements of sys- 
tematic botany; for she taught us the parts of a 
flower and compared flowers to show us how they 
might be alike and yet be different. Thus we learned 
that the good potato and the bad "jimson-weed" 
belonged to the same family; and, what was of less 
consequence, we even learned their botanical names 
along with those of various other plants. The so- 
norous Latin names seemed to have the property of 
permanently embedding themselves in a child's 
memory; it suggests a botanical beginning for the 
study of Latin, 

But mother told me nothing about the comet ; and 
she could not have known the sky, or we should 
have gained familiarity with some of the stars. Yet 
how could she know. It is improbable that there 
was any one to teach her, and in all likelihood she 
never saw a sky-map in her school-days. However, 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-FIFTIES 131 

she did teach us the Big Dipper and the Pole-star, 
and besides these stars, curiously enough, a little 
group which we called "Job's Coffin." I certainly got 
the impression that the four stars arranged in dia- 
mond-shape made the coffin; the other six naked- 
eye stars of Job's Coffin (Delphinus) 1 never noticed 
at all. The fact that Delphinus is a late summer and 
early autumn constellation agrees with the proba- 
bility that we would be out on warm August and 
September evenings, if ever, to look at the stars. 
What splendors we missed in the zodiacal pageant 
of the round year! It does not comfort me to re- 
flect that most children missed the glories of the 
night-sky then — and miss them now. 

But the life a child in that last decade of the pio- 
neer era was not all one of care-free days in the 
fields — I speak for the children of this chapter. For 
once a week there was "meetin', church, and Sun- 
day-school," as we phrased it. We were scrubbed on 
Saturday night, regardless of Vv'hat we fancied Clear 
Run had done for us eveiy day. On Sunday morn- 
ing we received a polishing-off ; then we were "fixed 
up" and were taken or sent to Sunday-school in 
the Methodist church. This building was the small- 
est of the four churches that stood at the intersec- 
tion of Broadway and Main Street, — a church for 
each corner. Before its "modernizing" in 1861 it 
had two ecclesiastical features which must have 
been regarded as desirable if not essential in the year 
of its building (1824) : a gallery and a high pulpit. 
But in 1861 this gallery was taken out; the pulpit 
was removed and in its place a low, wide platform 
and table were substituted. As thus changed the 



132 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

interior quite lost its churchly appearance. How- 
ever, the people who gathered in that room thought 
it much improved, which was the main thing. 

The Sunday-school which opened at nine o'clock 
was probably, in management and aims, not unlike 
modern Sunday-schools. For me the one exciting 
feature of the hour was the approach of the librar- 
ian with an armful of books. But, eager as I was 
to read, those books ministered neither to my wants 
nor my needs. The kind of book that I hungered 
for without knowing it was the Merry Adventures 
of Robin Hood. Howard Pyle was himself only a 
child at that time and the Merry Adventures were 
yet to be told. 

A preaching-service usually followed the Sunday- 
school. The men sat on one side of the church, the 
women on the other. The circuit preachers 
were men of zeal and energy; both qualities 
were needed by men who must carry their 
belongings in saddle-bags and splash through 
mud and storm to reach their appointments. 
But a sermon prepared on horseback could 
be as tedious to small hearers as if it were 
originated in a theological library. I liked the off 
Sundays when there was no preaching; then we 
could go home after that Sunday-school. It was 
dearly bought freedom; coming down Broadway and 
then on to Centerville involved meeting many per- 
sons walking to church — with always the possibility 
of encounter with the ladies of the "Lower Sem" of 
whom I stood in great awe, perhaps because they 
were a procession and seemed to need the whole 
sidewalk. Once beyond the town limits and in sight 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-FIFTIES 133 

of home, troubles were by no means over; for now I 
had to meet a long, if broken, string of carriages 
and buggies — Centerville people driving to church. 
I fancied that they looked severely at me. "Why 
was not this child going to church?" And there 
was no back road, no foot-path through the fields. 
I simply had to run the community gauntlet before I 
was safe within our own big gate. On rare occasions 
I went, after Sunday-school, to the Presbyterian 
church to be with grandmother. Her pew was on 
a side aisle, a wall pew at that, and only about one- 
third of the way up; but it was "climbing up Zion's 
hill" indeed to get there; my little knees quaked 
curiously as I went uncertainly along until I was 
safe by grandmother's side. Behind us, across the 
aisle, and in other parts of the church I located 
neighbors and acquaintances; but not even familiar 
faces were familiar here. The decorum and 
solemnity of the place was quite overpowering. I 
was distressed lest I should not behave properly, and 
thus make grandmother ashamed of me. The prob- 
lem of behavior seemed best solved by sitting ab- 
solutely stiff and motionless. In the high and dis- 
tant pulpit Mr. Little was conducting the service ; he 
was a thick-set, round-faced man with simple 
manners, and his sermons were even more incom- 
prehensible to me than were those of the circuit- 
rider in the little church across the street. 

Not until sunset when, with our elders, we some- 
times took a walk on the race-bank did we begin to 
see relief from the inscrutable ordering of this Sun- 
day. If it were summer just the fact of having our 
shoes and stockings on seemed to mark off the day 



134 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

from its fellows. So far from promoting pride or 
self-complacency this state of being even semi- 
dressed up reduced me, at least, to a little lump of 
docile stupidity. "Taking a walk" as contrasted 
with our usual free going showed it. What to me 
were the yellow-bellied catfish that would now and 
then swing into sight in that race ; and of what con- 
sequence were the "crawfish" over there in the wet 
cracks of the rock outcrop that I should want to be 
after them. But never mind! The Sunday sun is 
setting; tomorrow is Monday, just a plain day to do 
things in. 

Once in those early times grandfather took me 
with him to a political meeting to hear John A. Bing- 
ham. This was an event, an unforgetable event, to be 
going with gran'pa at night to a meeting which was 
not a church meeting and which was held in the 
dimly-lighted dingy town hall with mostly men for 
an audience; — I might have known that something 
was amiss, because the women were so few in that 
meeting. Judging from Bingham's speeches in the 
House of Representatives (1855-1864) we must 
have heard stirring words that night. Though I 
could understand more of what was said than of 
what the preachers preached on Sundays I do not 
recall a word of Bingham's speech. What im- 
pressed me and staid by me was the fact that here 
were matters to be talked about that concerned 
Ohio, and even more than just our State; and men 
were going to vote on these questions. 

There must have been books somewhere in Gran- 
ville, but in the early years here described I did not 
know of their existence; few were to be seen in any 



IN THE EIGHTEEN-FIFTIES 135 

of the homes that I ever entered. The little store on 
the few shelves in my own home consisted chiefly of 
books that were either wholly unintelligible or utter- 
ly uninteresting. It amazes me now to recall how, 
in sheer mental hunger, I read them as much as I 
did. In all that desert there was one dear oasis: 
Harper's Monthly^ founded in 1850. One of my 
uncles subscribed for this magazine, — in 1856 it 
must have been, for "Little Dorrit" was then run- 
ning as a serial; the first instalment was published 
in January, 1856. I read the pictures if not the text, 
as well as those of Porte Crayon's "Through 
Virginia," and "Through North Carolina" which 
appeared in 1855-56. But the truly evergreen and 
fruitful spots in this green island of magazine liter- 
ature were the articles furnished by travelers. I 
recall one such article in particular: "Pictures in 
Switzerland," pubhshed in May, 1857 and accom- 
panied with delightful woodcuts of scenery. It was 
possibly an advantage to have so few pictures. 
None were dismissed with a casual glance to be 
replaced with more and more as is the case today. 
I studied those Switzerland woodcuts until evei-y 
detail of mountain, stream and forest was unfad- 
ingly fixed in memory. This magazine was never 
thrown aside as a comparatively worthless back 
number. Every copy was carefully saved and 
re-read in subsequent years. When I graduated 
from the First Reader and passed to the delights of 
the Second I felt qualified to attack the text — big 
words and all — that belonged to the scenery pictures 
of those precious Harpers of 1857. In this way 
proceeded that part of my education which was 
connected with the printed and pictured word. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

EARLY INSTITUTIONS 

To Eudemus, greeting: 

I have sent my son to bring to you the second 
boolt of my Conies. Read it carefully and communicate 
it to such others as are worthy of it. 

— APOLLONIUS of Perga 

circ. 215 B. C. 

Ho, erery one that thirsteth; come ye to the waters. 

—ISAIAH. 

It is a noteworthy circumstance that a town no 
larger than Granville should have become the home 
of such a number of schools before the fiftieth year 
of its founding. That log school-house, built and 
used in the first winter, gave notice of the fixed 
intentions of the pioneers; and whatever the obsta- 
cles that from time to time operated to hinder edu- 
cational work the community overcame them and 
maintained the continuity of the advantages which 
it offered both to young men and young women — 
advantages that certainly could not be found in the 
average Ohio town of any of those States formed out 
of the Northwest Territorj\ 

In March, 1807, seven prominent members of the 
colony were appointed a committee "to pitch a 
Stake where to Set a Schoolhouse and Lot out Ma- 

136 



EARLY INSTITUTIONS 137 

terials to build the same." That is, sixteen months 
after their arrival they felt that they must have 
a better building for the great purpose of education. 
Bushnell relates the circumstances of the dismant- 
ling of the first school-house — which did not take 
place under the direction of the committee : 

While preparations were being made for the erection of 
the new building, the boys, in their evening pastimes on the 
common, bethought them that it would be a very jolly thing 
to take down the old log school-house. As it would help 
their sires thus much, they thought it would be a meritorious 
frolic rather than otherwise. Though it was on the public 
square, and their noisy proceeding must have been observed 
by older people, no one interfered with them. They first took 
out the glass windows with great care, which had replaced 
the oiled paper; took the batten door from its wooden hinges, 
and carried them, with all that was of any value, across the 
street, and stored them away at Mr. Josiah Graves'. Then, 
beginning with the weight poles, they dismantled it down to 
the joists. Then, becoming weary, they went home and to 
bed, and slept with quiet consciences. But Judge Rose and 
others thought it a good opportunity to give the boys a 
lesson on lawlessness. So, with one side of their faces in 
their sleeves, it was arranged, with Esquire Winchell as 
Justice, Samuel Thrall, Prosecuting Attorney, and Josiah 
Graves as Constable, to bring up a number of them for a 
sham trial. They were brought together one evening, one 
of them being taken out of bed for the purpose, and arraigned 
for trial, with the solemn countenances of parents and 
officials all around them. The indictment was read, the boys 
all pleaded guilty, and they were fined twenty-five cents each 
and costs. Twenty-five cent pieces were very scarce 
at that time, and it began to look pretty serious to them. It 
waked up their ideas about law and order. Then all the 
officers, as the boys looked unutterably penitent, consented 
to throw in their fees; and, finally, it was agreed, if the boys 
would ask forgiveness, that should end the affair. 



138 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 
From the same historian we learn that 

Early in 1811, Elias Gilman, Timothy Rose, Silas Winchell, 
Daniel Baker and Grove Case were made a body corporate, 
under the title of "Trustees of the Granville Religious and 
Literary Society," to have the care of Lot No. 11, given by 
the company for the support of ministers, and Lot No. 15, 
for school purposes, to improve, manage and dispose of the 
same, provided the express purpose and intent of the grant 
be answered. Subsequently a deed was given to these 
Trustees by the members of the Licking Company. 

This "Religious and Literai-y Society," represent- 
ing the spiritual and intellectual side of the com- 
pany's activities, seems to have been the surviving 
element when the Licking Land Company was dis- 
solved. The official management of school affairs 
was probably in the hands of this group of men for 
some years. About 1820 a two-storied brick school- 
house was built against the hill at the head of Main 
Street, though the upper story was not used for 
school purposes. Bushnell states that the first 
stoi-y was divided into two unequal rooms for the 
common schools; "the west room, where the boys 
were taught, being a little the larger, although 
diminished by the passage way to the room above." 
This certainly suggests that the boys and girls were 
taught in separate rooms. A woodcut of this old 
building (Bushnell, p. 118), made either from origi- 
nal drawings or conjecturally sketched from de- 
scription, might be guessed to be the picture of a 
dwelling in Old Edinburgh or colonial Boston. At 
the time of its erection it must have been the pride 
of Granville. 

In 1827 a young minister of New Hampshire birth 



EARLY INSTITUTIONS 139 

and training came to the colony as temporary pas- 
tor of the Congregational church. He remained to 
serve the church and the community for thirty-seven 
years. While Jacob Little's duties were primarily 
in connection with the church, he at once addressed 
himself, with his characteristic practical energy, to 
definite educational needs of his parish — and he 
probably looked upon the entire township as his 
parish. One of his first acts was the formation of 
classes for young ladies to whom he gave "special 
instruction in the higher branches." In this work 
he was aided by his wife a woman of education. 
What were those "higher branches" which were 
regarded as suitable and desirable for young ladies 
in 1827? Mr. Little, himself a recorder of fragments 
of Granville history, says, "For two or three years 
about this time, Dr. W. W. Bancroft and myself were 
self-made trustees to employ teachers, to find a 
room where we could, and keep up the ladies' 
school." 

The school thus begun and managed seems to 
have continued vidthout interruption until 1834 when 
Elizabeth Grant and Nancy Bridges, of Ipswich, 
Mass., came on to take charge; it had now attained 
to the dignity of an academy with a building of its 
own. Two years later, owing to Miss Grant's re- 
signation. Miss Bridges was placed at the head of 
the school. She is described as "a lady of wonder- 
ful executive ability," and it is said that "she at 
once carried the school to the front rank and sus- 
tained it there." In 1836 the institution was char- 
tered as Granville Academy, with eleven trustees. 
At the same time, a different site was secured and 



140 WILD TURI^YS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

a larger building put up. "From the more complete 
organization of the school with a boarding depart- 
ment in 1834 until 1844 it was conducted as a man- 
ual labor school, the young ladies doing most of the 
work in the culinary department." In 1844 it ceased 
to be a manual labor school, and in the following 
year it passed into the hands of Mr. W. D. Moore, in 
whose care it remained until 1854. 

This Granville Academy had a boys' department 
until 1833. In that year a school for boys only was 
established; it served the purposes of a preparatory 
school for boys who were fitting for college, until 
the new high school in the common-school system 
of Ohio made the male academy no longer neces- 
sary. 

Meanwhile, the Baptists had established in 1832 
a school for young women, beginning with twenty- 
five scholars. It also had a boarding department, 
and could thus invite out-of-town pupils. Seven 
years later the school was bought by the Episcopal- 
ians and was known as the Episcopal Female Sem- 
inary. Under this new arrangement its first prin- 
cipal was Mr. Mansfield French, a son-in-law of 
Deacon Silas Winchell. Some years later, the 
school, as an Episcopalian school, was moved to 
another town, while the property returned to the 
hands of the Baptists by whom it was used for the 
purposes of another school which they had been 
building up. This school, due initially to the efforts 
of Mr. S. N. Burton, pastor of the Baptist church, 
was to be known as the Young Ladies' Institute 
until it became Shepardson College. 

Parallel with these various efforts to secure edu- 



EARLY INSTITUTIONS 141 

cational opportunities for young women was the 
development of collegiate advantages for young 
men. 

In 1830 the Ohio Baptist Educational Society 
thought so favorably of Granville as a desirable lo- 
cation for an institution for collegiate and theologi- 
cal instruction — primarily with reference to the 
training of young men for the ministry — that the 
necessary purchase of property and an^angement of 
buildings was made, and instruction was begun in 
December 1831 with thirty-seven students. One of 
these students was Sam White, referred to in Chap- 
ter VI. ,. 

In 1845 the name of the school was changed from 
Granville Literary and Theological Institution to 
Granville College, and in 1856 it was again changed, 
becoming Denison University. 

It is not intended here to give even a sketch of 
the history of this institution or to speak of the 
rather long line of able and faithful men who have 
devoted themselves to its interests either as presi- 
dents or professors. Because the story of its found- 
ing and development is kept in memory primarily 
by the denomination which has been a cherishing 
mother to the school; and its history is a chapter 
in the larger history of Ohio's educational institu- 
tions. It is enough to remind the reader that Ohio 
is a State of many colleges, and Granville is favor- 
ably known in academic circles everywhere as the 
home of Denison University — one of Ohio's very 
best. 

Shepardson College, as an integral part of the 
University, is not subject to those uncertainties of 



142 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

fortune whicli beset detached schools; it has an 
assured status and future as a place for the educa- 
tion of young women, offering rich and various 
advantages, — some of which are due to its happy 
location in a little town among the hills rather than 
in any city. One could wish that the passing decades 
had somehow dealt as kindly with that other school 
which brought Nancy Bridges from Ipswich and a 
series of teachers from Mt. Holyoke. Its formal 
work is ended, yet no one can truthfully affirm that 
its influence is anywhere near an end. Such influ- 
ences are tenacious of life; they take themselves 
on from generation to generation. Looked at his- 
torically, the major achievement of that Granville 
Female Academy consisted in holding its own hon- 
orably and making good in the prelude to the era of 
unstinted educational and professional opportunities 
for women. The school was, wholly without inten- 
tion on the part of its founders, one of those early 
nineteenth-century laboratories in which women — 
both as teachers and students — were tried out; as 
if Destiny would know whether the female creature 
had mental powers worth cultivating. 

The Young Ladies' Institute and the Granville 
Female Academy — contemporaries if not rivals — 
were locally known as the "Upper Sem" and "Lower 
Sem," respectively. The home of the former was 
in the west end of the town near the University 
buildings, while the latter was located quite at the 
eastern extremity of Broadway. For geographic 
and denominational reasons as well as family ones, 
I knew more and saw more, in my early girlhood, 
of the "Lower Sem." Horace Wolcott was a stead- 



EARLY INSTITUTIONS 143 

fast friend and supporter of the school, a trustee, 
1837-'64, and honorary trustee during the last five 
years of his life, 1870-1875. As an illustration of 
the kind of thing he would do for the school, he 
made it his business to see that the students had 
an abundant supply of fresh pure milk which he 
supplied from his farm, carrying the milk himself 
up to the school buildings. Perhaps he was paid 
for the milk; but knowing the man, it is easier to 
believe that he held this to be a service to be ren- 
dered without other reward than the satisfaction of 
putting one good article of food on the Academy 
table. When I was a little girl grandfather no longer 
carried the milk; but I knew how he did it in those 
years when he was young enough and strong 
enough: on a high shelf in the spring-house was a 
neck-yoke, carved to fit a man's shoulders; it was 
a single piece of wood with horizontal arms project- 
ing beyond the wearer's shoulders. Pails of milk 
were hung by hooks from the extremities of these 
arms, while the two hands were thus free to carry 
additional pails. That neck-yoke ought to have been 
preserved in the Centerville museum which never 
existed. 

Grandfather was glad to have a school where his 
daughters could be educated; he and grandmother 
must have appreciated that famous first principal; 
she was probably a frequent as well as an honored 
guest in their home, for one of their little girls was 
named Nancy Bridges. It was in this academy, 
under the administration of William D. Moore, that 
mother received her education. The school at that 
time must have borne the name, Granville Female 



144 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

Seminary. I always heard it referred to as the 
Seminary, or the "Sem"; and in a copy of Butler's 
Analogy — now among my treasured books — I find, 
in delicate script: Ruth R. Wolcott, G. F. S. 1848. 
Mother always spoke of Mr. Moore with the greatest 
esteem and gratitude. He must have been a gentle- 
man and a scholar, as well as one who gladly 
taught. A Vermont man by birth and a graduate 
of Dartmouth college, 1837, he had intended to seek 
an appointment as a foreign missionary; but finding 
himself not strong enough for the hardships of a 
missionary's life he turned to teaching— happily for 
that Ohio academy. I here gratefully acknowledge 
my own indebtedness to William D. Moore because 
of what my mother gained in his class-room. 

Of the subjects studied in the Academy in the late 
40's three certainly were: logic (Whately) ; element- 
ary botany; and the "analogy of rehgion to the 
constitution and course of nature" (Butler). The 
makers of that curriculum might have done worse! 
Thus, adopting the modern cavalier attitude, they 
might have viewed logic as an "elective" — to be 
studied or brushed aside, as the student pleased. 
Botany, in 1850, was scarcely deemed a man's job; 
it was the one gentle — and genteel— science suit- 
able for a young ladies' seminary. But those same 
young ladies were at least better off than the up-to- 
date student who either goes through college with 
no science at all or "works off" perhaps one required 
science as a tiresome and despised prerequisite for 
graduation. As for the famous "Analogy" — twen- 
tieth-century teachers might use it to advantage in 
class-rooms where the history of the mental devel- 



EARLY INSTITUTIONS 145 

opment of the human race is seriously studied. 
Probably no teacher does so use it. One is also 
obliged to doubt whether colonial teachers with 
theological training made any connection between 
the work of Bishop Butler and that of Bishop 
Whately. A treatise so formal and formidable as 
the Analogy and proceeding from such a dis- 
tinguished source was not to be looked upon as 
ground where one might go hunting for fallacies 
and sophistries. In spite of this assumption, and 
whatever the treatment of the text, that seminary 
study of Butler could not have been without distinct 
value. 

One of the excitements of my early years was the 
exercise-walk of the Lower Sem girls who some- 
times came as far as the stone bridge — an excite- 
ment only less than that occasioned when a "mov- 
ing-wagon" passed by, or the itinerant tin-peddler 
arrived. These academic ladies walked two-by-two 
in decorous procession, one or more teachers head- 
ing the procession whilst others brought up the 
rear. Their progress was usually watched by me 
from the vantage-point of the broad top of our big 
gate. As they drew nearer I would slide to a posi- 
tion of safety and maintain a lookout by peeping 
through the wide spaces in the board fence. I recall 
one time when they opened the gate and continued 
on the private road leading to our barn, evidently 
expecting by this route to reach the banks of the 
reservoir. This seemed to me to be taking great 
liberties; for the front fence in those days was 
intended to show where the world left off and home 
began. However, after reaching the wagon-shed 



146 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

they faced about and returned as they came; for 
there, a bit beyond, was the Osage orange hedge, 
and even if they had discovered my own particular 
spot for crawling through, not one of them could 
have got her head safely past the thorns — much less 
her whole self; for it was the day of balloon-like 
crinoline; also, of an astonishing mode of coiffure 
known as the chignon or "waterfall." In some 
way the back hair was given the shape of a ball, 
comparable in size to the head itself; over this struc- 
ture a net was drawn, thereby insuring to it a day's 
permanency. She who could maintain the largest 
waterfall had the best claim to style. With their 
much done-up hair to be careful about and their 
wide crinoUne to be waded through, the seminary 
ladies were believed to find exercise in a slow march 
along dusty country roads. It seems rather a pity 
that they could not forsee what time would do with 
some of the limitations of their day as expressed in 
social convention and fashion as well as in school 
regulations; a pity that they had neither dream nor 
vision of their representative granddaughters — 
modern college women — training for places on the 
varsity crew, competing for the championship in 
tennis, running relay races and riding astride, 
and wearing a sports dress made of serge or khaki 
and cut bifurcate. On the other hand, it is just as 
well that no prophetic voice spoke on this subject to 
the good pastors and deacons — teachers of the peo- 
ple — in the Tallow Candle period. Whatever their 
motives for promoting female education they cer- 
tainly had no wish to change the existing social con- 
dition of women. The man to whose initiative those 



EARLY INSTITUTIONS 147 

early classes for young ladies were due must have 
known more theology than psychology, and more 
metaphysics than history of human society; else he 
would have recognized the risk involved in teaching 
a girl to read. There were analogies that might 
have guided him but no precedents. 

That early esteem for education, viewed in all its 
aspects, clearly shows that the colonial conception 
of a school of collegiate grade was that of a buttress 
of the church. Thus those who so steadfastly and 
generously encouraged the Granville schools were 
for the church first. And they were wholly free, 
apparently, from any fear that either the knowledge 
or the mental habits acquired by their young people 
in these schools would ever lead to any challenge 
of creeds or arraignment of social conditions. That 
they were correct in their assumptions is sustained 
by the fact that far-reaching movements for the 
betterment of conditions in human society have, as 
a rule, originated and been promoted outside of the 
church and school, and often with the distinct oppo- 
sition of these two institutions. The disappoint- 
ments that rose to meet the sincere and single- 
hearted educational leaders appeared in quite an- 
other quarter: their children — especially their sons 
— did not want education. America's greatest 
sociologist has affirmed again and again in his wTit- 
ings that "the normal mind is hungry for truth."* 
Theoretically this statement seems to be defensible ; 
but we are confronted by the practical fact that the 
majority of minds are indifferent to knowledge ; that 

*L. F. Ward: Dynamic Sociology. 



148 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

is, to "objective truth comprehended by the intel- 
lect." Study is irksome and any degree of devotion 
to knowledge interferes too seriously with devotion 
to pleasure and to business. 

Most Granville boys in 1850-1860 entered man- 
hood without the liberal education which was freely 
offered to them in their own community. On those 
kindly north hills overlooking the village, Homer and 
Plato waited as they have waited so many centuries 
in gardens and porches and on hilltops; Horace and 
Virgil sang there; Euclid and Newton taught all 
who would learn.* Sectarianism unfortunately held 
so large a place in the community life that many, 
first and last, sacrificed education to it because they 
were outside the Baptist communion. It was 
important to have a Presbyterian brand of algebra, 
or history bearing a Methodist hall-mark. Yet 
when all allowance is made for these prejudices it 
still remains true that mental inertia was such that 
the average boy did not seriously consider a college 
education. Young men like Tom Corwin and Sam 
White were rare in the early decades of the nine- 
teenth century — as they are in any century. It is 
said of Corwin, the "wagon-boy of Turtle Creek," (in 
southwestern Ohio) that "he early had a thirst for 
general knowledge and was always engaged in 
studying some book or subject whether at school 
or not, when not engaged in other business. This 
continued to be his habit through early life, and he 
never lost more time in amusement or company 
than necessary courtesy required. He seldom per- 

♦Appendix. Note C. 



EARLY INSTITUTIONS 149 

mitted the social gatherings of the young to win 
him away from his studies." One is not surprised 
to find Corwin speaking so emphatically as he does 
regarding the duty of every voter to think. 

It does not fall within the province of this narra- 
tive to inquire into the cause — undoubtedly a com- 
plex one — of an indifference to education that 
knows neither time nor place. It is necessary, how- 
ever, to point out that Granville was not able to show 
herself exceptional. In common with all other col- 
lege and university towns she offered intellectual 
treasures to her children, but they turned away to 
more alluring riches ; she called to those of her own 
household, but they were not thirsty. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE BURNT-OUT CANDLE 

I feel like one 

Who treads alone 
Some banquet-hall deserted. 

Whose lights are fled, 

Whose garlands dead. 
And all but he departed! 

—THOMAS MOORE. 

The close of the Tallow Candle period falls practi- 
cally midway between those first years of Ohio's 
existence as a State and the second decade of the 
twentieth century. Midway as regards time; but in 
prevailing social customs and beliefs 1860 was much 
more closely related to 1805 than to 1918. Applied 
physics: the electric car, the motor-boat and the 
automobile, wireless telegraphy, moving pictures 
and the telephone, have wrought readjustments to 
an old environment and these material changes are 
paralleled by modifications of earlier theories con- 
cerning standards of duty and conduct and ideals 
of social justice. If much less was said in 1850 
about democracy and liberty it is also true that in 
some respects less needed to be said. It was a 
premachinery period, cheap-land period. Few indi- 
viduals, if any, in the States of the Northwest Terri- 
tory had become very wealthy; nor had those 
economic conditions yet appeared which made pos- 

150 



THE BURNT-OUT CANDLE 151 

sible the phenomenon of a class living in poverty. 
A social differentiation as regarded riches and pov- 
erty did not set in until after the Civil War. 

As an agricultural region the major part of the 
community lived outside the towns and villages; 
and in that important roomy life everybody killed 
hogs and sheared sheep and cooked for harvest 
hands. These activities made a bond of common 
interest and while they lasted we breathed a pioneer 
and democratic atmosphere. If an errand was neces- 
sary a child was sent ; and he walked, for the bicycle 
was not. Or, if the distance was too great and the 
need urgent, somebody went on horseback. As a 
result, proposed errands were all tested by the ques- 
tion of actual urgency. Men of the timber-lands, 
like those of the grass-lands, were compelled to 
supplement their own legs with the horse's stronger 
ones in the daily need of getting about the country. 
The horse was thus a motor of so much value that 
horse-stealing naturally ranked as the most flagrant 
of offenses in the robbery line of crimes. 

Granville's public connection with Newark was 
an omnibus, a four-horse lumbering vehicle which 
began running in 1849. We who dwelt by Clear 
Run could hear this omnibus as it rounded the 
shoulder of the big hill; it came clattering down 
the road and over the stone bridge and disappeared 
from sight behind the next high ground, rumbling 
and creaking as it went. The driver — and perhaps 
the intelhgent horses — knew the many mud-holes 
on that six-mile road, especially in the early spring 
when the frost was coming out of the ground. The 
worst pulls were over the two steep hills just west 



152 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

of the Dugway. Yet it was a pleasant journey, — 
at least one judged it must be when Denison stu- 
dents, at the beginning and ending of the school 
terms, packed the interior of the omnibus and 
swarmed hilariously over the top of it, carpet-bags 
in hand. 

Today a scientifically-built highway has made a 
memory of those old dirt and gravel roads; and a 
memory also of many a green bank and flower- 
grown brookside and noble tree. For the highway 
of the automobile is ruthless and overbearing. The 
final impression left with one who travels it is that 
the country is unimportant; the great business or 
pleasure is to go and get to some distant point. All 
obstacles must clear the way. Country delights 
that once greeted the foot-goer or the horse-borne 
traveler have given place to the joys of velocity. 
Yet these cylindered machines, in partnership with 
the telephone, have so largely ended the isolation 
and loneliness of the farm that they may well expect 
forgiveness. Only the people of the log cabin in 
the clearing with the ox-team and the dirt road 
knew how profound the loneliness could be on the 
settlement's borders. Farm isolation was marked 
enough even in 1850. 

The decorum of our Presbyterian church forbade 
visiting in the aisles or on the steps of the "house 
of worship." I am sure of this church, though a 
like restraint undoubtedly marked the behavior of 
sister congregations. The members of each flock 
had glimpses, at least, of one another and were 
content to wait for the real social opportunities 
afforded by the quilting-party and the job at the 



THE BURNT-OUT CANDLE 153 

blacksmith shop. The "early candle-hght" gather- 
ings: the midweek prayer-meeting, the spelling- 
school and singing-school, also offered compensa- 
tions for the proprieties that marked Sabbath as- 
semblings. Eager to go to these community meet- 
ings we trudged and stumbled along the uneven 
roads which were muddy in wet weather and full of 
frozen ruts bridged with films of ice in winter, our 
way uncertainly lighted by the moon; or, if it were 
a moonless night, by an even more uncertain lantern 
carried by someone who walked in front. We went, 
it seems to me now, just "to see folks." The deep- 
seated primitive desire for group companionship 
found satisfaction in these occasional night gather- 
ings after the day's work was done. 

As to lanterns — the candle rigged to go out-o'- 
doors — the first that I remember was made of per- 
forated tin. A sheet of this tin had been rolled into 
a cylinder five or six inches in diameter and capped 
with a conical top; a little door by which a short 
candle was placed in a tin socket and a bail for 
carrying completed this simple lantern. In time it 
was replaced by a square lantern consisting of four 
pieces of glass set into a metal frame with one side 
hinged and opening to admit the candle. The second 
lantern was regarded as a great improvement: the 
light shone through glass instead of little holes in a 
piece of tin. One lantern or the other was neces- 
sary whether we had to go to the barn on after-dark 
duties or to the school-house for evening pleasures. 

But, as a rule, we were indoors when darkness 
fell and the soft lights that shone through the small- 
paned windows were made by tallow candles. The 



154 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

picture of grandfather Wolcott's fireside was as 
familiar as that of my own home. Grandfather had 
his favorite brass candlestick; it was built saucer- 
shaped with a short tube rising from the center. Old 
and battered but of real brass, years of polishing had 
not worn through to any baser metal. Holding his 
paper in his left hand and this candlestick in his 
right grandfather read on and on until his bedtime, 
undisturbed by the fireside talk around him. The 
tallow ran dow^n and occasionally dropped on his 
hand or the paper, and now and then he paused long 
enough to use the snuffers on his candle. The snuf- 
fers, black and made of iron, worked like a pair of 
scissors, but they had a boxlike arrangement mount- 
ed on the blades which caught the bit of wick when 
cut off. The paper was usually the New York 
Tribune, Greeley's Tribune established in 1841. 
Grandfather was probably one of its early sub- 
scribers. The writings of the great editor suited 
him; he believed in the far West to which young men 
were editorially exhorted to go. Good judgment 
and perhaps some sense of duty must have in- 
fluenced him to "stay by the stuff"- — the little Ohio 
farm which had so long claimed his care and re- 
warded his skill; otherwise he would have been off 
to the Missouri country which was then "out West." 
He contented himself with outfitting his boys one 
after another. I recall one morning when a team 
of valuable horses with a trim new moving-wagon 
stood at the big gate by the spring. There were 
some sheep; horses and sheep were headed west. 
Grandfather had thought of everything for the jour- 
ney and for the new home beyond the Mississippi. 



THE BURNT-OUT CANDLE 155 

His pioneer heart must have stirred with longing for 
a share of his son's adventure; but he turned with 
silent resignation to his days in the familiar fields 
'round the hill and his evenings with the Tribune. 

Grandmother had her candle, too; it usually illu- 
minated a page of a leather-bound volume of Scott's 
Commentaries on the Old Testament which lay 
open on her lap. Her chair was always flanked by 
an enormous work-basket which certainly had half 
a bushel of socks to be darned and garments to be 
mended. The Children of Israel disputed with this 
basket for attention, and often neither won; for 
grandmother was keenly interested in the public af- 
fairs of her own time and would stop both reading and 
mending to share in the fireside discussions which 
her elder children started. She read the Tribune 
afternoons in the brief half -hour when she was lying 
down in her bedroom and supposed to be resting. 
Grandmother rarely smiled, and I cannot remember 
ever seeing her laugh; but instead of smiles and 
laughter there dwelt on her face a look of grave and 
kindly sympathy controlled by a cautious appraise- 
ment of your remarks and arguments. She was a 
person of few words, but what she said could be de- 
I)ended on both for truth and good judgment. Of 
the entire band that built Granville probably no 
other member more completely summed up in char- 
acter the distinctive pioneer traits: hardihood, in- 
trepidity, thrift, moral sturdiness, than did Rebecca 
Winchell Wolcott. She lived to see many changes — 
the changes of the first three-quarters of the nine- 
teenth century; but she belonged essentially to the 
decades of frontier simplicity and frontier risks. I 



156 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

cannot construct any picture of her in the midst of 
twentieth-century conveniences and appointments. 
I cannot, for instance, imagine her taking a tele- 
phone receiver from its hook to ask Mr. Merriman 
how much he is paying for eggs; or stepping into a 
low easy car to go to church. Some boy would be 
going "up town" and he is charged to stop at Mr. 
Merriman's place and ask about eggs. On Sun- 
days she climbed with difficulty up into the little 
buggy and one of her sons drove to church. This 
buggy had no rubber tires, — nobody's buggy had 
them; the seat had no back support; such supports 
were an unthought-of luxury in that day, — at least 
it was not a feature of the cramped little two-pas- 
senger run-a-bout that we called a buggy. As I re- 
view the circumstances of this grandmother's life 
I am quite sure that hidden away somewhere in her 
cap-bands she carried a scallop-shell of philosophic 
quiet. 

The obtrusive quality of the highway and the 
shorn condition of the hills are the features which 
most impress the wayfarer who returns after a long 
absence and enters Granville by Centerville street. 
Various scratches — driveways — break Nature's 
grading of the hillsides; yet the valley and the bor- 
dering ranges of hills, viewed as a whole, retain all 
their old-time loveliness. The Town Spring once 
so prized is now neglected and unused. It shall be 
for community use "as long as water runs," said 
Jesse Munson in giving the spring to the Granville 
land company. Such times as were measured by 
the free running of the waters of that spring have 
come to an end. Bits of retaining walls throughout 



THE BURNT-OUT CANDLE 157 

the town as well as foundations of various old 
houses — walls and foundations built of native stone 
— speak eloquently of the skilful masonry of the 
pioneers. But whether in the town itself or in its 
outskirts the remnants are few that testify to build- 
ing activities in the turkey and tallow candle days. 
Silas Winchell's gristmill and Spencer Wright's tan- 
nery have utterly disappeared and with them the 
saw-mill near the mouth of Clear Run. The circu- 
lar banks of Norton Case's reservoir and the long 
sinuous ones of the saw-mill head-race might now be 
easily confused with the neighboring earthworks of 
the mound-builders. As for Clear Run — Nature's 
own fashioning of a little waterway — I have in an 
earlier chapter hinted at the fate of Clear Run. 

Careful search identifies the spot where the noble 
mulberry doubtless stood. It is marked by the 
blackened and decayed snags of a stump barely pro- 
jecting above the ground . . . No, I am mistaken; 
there is no stump, worn by fire and weather, on that 
spot. I see again the proud tree and the mighty 
grape-vine in all their strength and vigor. And across 
the reaches of sixty years I hear a sweet voice sing- 
ing: 

"Oft in the stilly night. 
Ere slumber's chain has bound me, 

Fond Memory brings the light 
Of other days around me"; 

the soft music has the wistfulness that one feels in 
Beethoven's Minuet in G. It is twilight and the sleepy 
play-worn children clustering around the singer's 
chair are the same ones who dashed along the race- 



158 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

bank and up through the woods in the early morning 
to get the mulberries. 

The crowded stones in Granville's colonial "burial 
lot" and its neighboring cemetery bear the names of 
many of those early settlers. Migratorius might well 
be cut beneath each name. They were pilgrims in- 
deed; yet they camped long enough among their 
chosen sheltering hills to write one of the heroic in- 
troductory chapters for the history of the first State 
formed from the Northwest Territory. 



APPENDIX 

Note A. The reader will say, "Your trees loom 
large in memory, but how large are they in reality?" 
In justification, therefore, of Morris Schaff's state- 
ments as well as my own I give the following facts 
taken from Gray, Manual of Botany; Puller, Practi- 
cal Forestry; Hough, Handbook of the Trees of the 
Northeastern United States and Canada. 

1. Black Walnut. — A large and handsome tree 
often 90 to 150 ft. high (Gray) ; trunk 4 to 6 ft. in 
diameter (Hough) ; if the trees had been left stand- 
ing they would now be worth many times more than 
the land is, from which they were so ruthlessly de- 
stroyed (Fuller). 

2. Shell-bark Hickory. — Large and handsome 
tree, 70 to 90 ft. high or more, of great economic 
value (Gray) ; this stately hickory occasionally at- 
tains the height of 120 ft. and 3 or 4 ft. in diameter 
of trunk (Hough). 

3. White Ash. — A large and very valuable forest 
tree (Gray) ; one of the most valuable hardwood 
trees of the American forest and one of the stateliest 
representatives of its genus (Hough) ; reaches a 
height of 70 to 80 ft. (Hough) . 

4. White Oak. — Attaining under most favorable 
conditions when growing in the forest, a height of 
150 ft. and trunk 4 to 5 ft. in diameter (Hough) ; 
stem 6 ft. and sometimes more in diameter (Puller) . 

159 



160 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

5. Beech.— 75 to 100 ft. high (Gray) ; straight 
columnar trunk 3 or 4 ft. in thickness. One of the 
most distinct and beautiful trees of our American 
forests (Hough). 

6. White-wood (Tulip-tree). — A most beautiful 
tree, sometimes 140 ft. high and 8 to 9 ft. in diame- 
ter in the Western States (Gray) ; in the valleys of 
the streams tributary to the Ohio River individuals 
have been found to attain the height of from 150 to 
190 ft. with columnar trunks 8 or 10 ft. in diameter 
and free from branches to a height of from 80 to 
100 ft. (Hough). 

7. Sugar Maple. — Often reaches a height of 80 to 
90 ft. with a stem 3 to 4 ft. in diameter (Fuller) ; the 
stately Sugar Maple in the forest sometimes attains 
the height of 100 ft. or more with trunk 3 to 5 ft. 
in diameter (Hough). 

8. Sycamore. — Our largest tree, often 90 to 130 
ft. high with a trunk 6 to 14 ft. in diameter (Gray) ; 
the stems of large specimens often becoming hollow 
only a shell of 3 or 4 inches remaining sound. 
These old hollow trunks were utilized by the early 
settlers in Western New York, Ohio and Indiana for 
grain-bins, smoke-houses and similar purposes (F\il- 
ler). 

One historian of Licking County relates that a 
pioneer family in the South Fork bottoms lived for 
a year or more in a hollow sycamore-tree. When 
they got a better house the sheltering sycamore was 
ungratefully felled and "the stump kept to fatten 
hogs in. It was at least 10 ft. in diameter." 

Note B. Morris Schaff's testimony ought to be 
added to all that has been recorded in recent omi- 



APPENDIX 161 

thological literature regarding the former abund- 
ance and later absolute disappearance of the wild 
pigeon. In Etna and Kirkersville Schaff says: 

But the game bird that overshadowed all others in its num- 
bers, and left the greatest gap by its sudden and, I fear, com- 
plete destruction, was the wild pigeon. The fate of this 
strong-winged, far-ranging, and tameless bird is pathetic. 
They are all gone. Once they darkened the sky. Millions 
of them flew over Etna Township as they traveled to and 
from their feeding-ground to their roost in Bloody Run swamp. 
The pigeons set toward the roost about an hour before sun- 
down, often lighting in the intermediate timber for a while, 
and then passed on in a broad stream as far as the eye could 
reach. After arriving at the swamp they circled round and 
round till dark, when they settled down, covering every limb 
and twig. I never went there but once, and then in company 
with some of the farm hands. It was late .autumn, and a 
fleet of heavy clouds was sailing across a full moon. We 
entered the swamp from the north side, about opposite the 
big island. The party was equipped with single-barrel shot- 
guns and old percussion muskets, with the barrels cut off to 
shot-gun lengths. We all went in together, but not more than 
a few rods, when the men began to shoot. The birds would 
rise in throngs, with thundering noise, but would soon come 
back, for there were hunters, apparently, all along the mar- 
gins of the swamp, and the firing was like that of a closely 
engaged skirmish line. When the pigeons returned they 
would light all over and around us, and no aim was neces- 
sary, or possible, for that matter. We carried away two large 
three bushel bags full by nine o'clock, and doubtless did 
not get one half of what we killed. The owls and minks that 
infested the swamps lived on what we left. By ten o'clock 
the firing ceased, and the poor creatures could then find 
peace for the rest of the night . . . The pigeons left the swamp 
about daylight in vast columns several miles in length, and 
would fly off to their various feeding grounds, distant from 
one to over two hundred miles. 

They fed all through the beech woods, and it was most 



162 WILD TURKEYS AND TALLOW CANDLES 

interesting to see them feeding. If they were approaching, 
there would be the appearance of a blue wave four or five feet 
high rolling toward you, produced by the pigeons in the rear 
flying to the front. When startled while feeding, their sud- 
den rise would sound like rumbling thunder. The last time 
they nested in Licking was about 1845 or 1846. I fix that 
date, for my visit to their nesting grounds in the big woods 
with my father is about my first remembrance. The nests 
were constructed of small twigs laid up loosely and very care- 
lessly, apparently; and yet I used to see the remains of some 
of them when fox-hunting through these woods eleven or 
twelve years after they were made . . . From 1860 to 1870 the 
destruction of the wild pigeons went on at an astounding and 
deplorable rate, chiefly by netting; and in 1880 they had almost 
disappeared . . . Had any one standing under a broad flight in 
1850 predicted that in less than fifty years not one would be 
left, he would have been set down as a dismal crank. But so 
it is and, now with the fate of the wild pigeon in view, we are 
compelled to believe that the doom of the wild turkey, swan, 
woodcock, the upland plover, the most innocent of all birds, is 
sealed. In the light of this slowly approaching calamity, a 
hunter who comes in with more than two of any of our game 
birds should be looked on with aversion. 

It is obvious that in central Ohio, at least, the wild 
pigeon was the successor of the wild turkey as a 
game bird — making up in numbers what was lacking 
in size. I remember, as a very little girl, seeing my 
uncle, Edward Wolcott, and other young men start 
off pigeon-shooting. They brought back many 
scores of birds — needing good-sized grain-bags to 
carry their game in. These Granville boys no doubt 
went to the great roost in the swamp of which 
Schaff writes. 

Note C. The first published course of study at the 
Granville Literary and Theological Institution is 
dated 1836 and reads as follows: 



APPENDIX 

FRESHMAN CLASS 



163 



FIRST TERM: 

Algebra — Bridge's. 
Latin — Livy — Folsom's. 
Greek — Xenophon. 
Roman Antiquities. 



SECOND TERM: 

Davies' Legendre. 

Latin — Tacitus. 

Greek — Plato or Herodotus. 

Grecian Antiquities. 



SOPHOMORE CLASS 
FIRST TERM: SECOND TERM: 



Applications of Algebra to 
Geometry. 

Plane and Spherical Trig- 
onometry. 

Latin — Horace. 

Greek — Homer. 

Rhetoric — Newman's. 



Conic Sections and Topo- 
graphy. 
Latin- — Horace. 
Greek — Euripides. 
Natural Theology — Paley. 



JUNIOR CLASS 
FIRST TERM: SECOND TERM: 



Natural Philosophy — 

Olmstead. 
Latin — Cicero de Oratore. 
Logic — Whately. 
Chemistry. 



Natural Philosophy — Olm- 
stead. 
Greek — Sophocles. 
Rhetoric — Whately. 
Geology and Mineralogy. 



SENIOR CLASS 
FIRST TERM: SECOND TERM: 



Astronomy. 

Intellectual Philosophy. 
Latin — Juvenal or Terrence. 
Evidences of Christianity. 



Moral Philosophy — Wayland. 
Butler's Analogy. 
Political Economy — Say, 
Greek — Demosthenes. 



